Social Media Aggregation 101
Keith Gerr
AMA Oregon: Professional Development
10.09

What we’ll cover:
• Defining social media aggregation (SMA)
• Navigating the landscape
• Tools/Techniques
• Where is SMA headed?

Social Media Aggregation - consolidation of
inbound/outbound web-based feeds into a
dashboard view for the purpose of creating
efficiencies in:
• Monitoring
• Dialoguing much more than
• Sharing simultaneously
updating your “status”
• Collaborating
• Measuring
• To-be-determined purposes

Current State
• SMA market is rapidly growing and
evolving with a mix of highly
interoperable platforms
- Mix of free and paid services allows
for low-cost trial/error

Current State
• SMA market fractured by feature-set
and platform support
- Need to consider time/skill-sets to
tie things together

Current State
• No single robust tool exists yet that
provides a holistic feature set
- Opportunity for enterprise dat-
application providers (SCRM, BI)
search engines and major social-nets
to bring a full-featured solution to
market

SMA segments we’ll dive into
Segment Macro Micro Specialized Transformative
Strong business focus
Supports large Supports limited
amount of social number of social Focused on a specific
Includes listening
streams streams function like monitoring
Definition or format delivery like
platforms, SCRM, BI
SM management tools
Messaging/dialogue Messaging/dialogue video and url shortening
and other enterprise
focused focused
application providers
Example

Given the fast-evolving SMA space, it’s
important to determine selection criteria:
• Purpose - business, personal, both?
• Functionality - dialogue, monitor, syndicate,
measurement etc. ?
• Scale - api, mobile, workflow, etc.?
• Interface - easy to use, customizable etc.?

Macro: FriendFeed
• Supports many social-feeds
• Individual/Group subscription and contribution
• Accessible from email, phone and IM
• API support

Macro: Netvibes
• Supports many social-feeds
• Extremely widget friendly
• “Follower” and “Friend” support
• No analytics yet (they suggest using Google Analytics)

Macro: Flock
• Social -browser (based on Mozilla Firefox architecture)
• Drag and drop functionality
• Supports many social feeds
• Blog editor and photo-upload tool built-in

Micro: TweetDeck
• Supports Twitter, Facebook and MySpace
• Dialogue-friendly/customizable interface
• Built-in video recording and watching (via 12seconds and Qik)
• Analytics can be accessed if use Bit.ly url shortening

Micro: LinkedIn
• Robust personal/group/company networking
• Widget integrations w/ Slideshare, Wordpress, Company Buzz etc.
• Poll syndication widget
• Premium subscription provides stats on visitors

Specialized: Socialmention
• Free keyword-based monitoring
• Can search by blogs, microblogs, comments, events, image, video etc.
• Real-time “buzz” widget
• Data export feature

Specialized: TubeMogul
• Multi-site video uploader
• Free and premium versions available
• Cross-platform analysis
• Multi-user and multi-campaign functionality

Specialized: bit.ly
• Url shortening service
• Allows for real-time link tracking
• Growing API integration includes Twitter, Google Reader and TypePad
• Browser bookmarklet and sidebar available

Specialized: Digg
• Crowd-sourced content curation and rating
• Facebook Connect integration
• Community comment threads
• Promote interests/follow others

Transformative: Radian6
• Listening and dialogue platform
• Provides workflow features
• Pulls from wide range of social data (blogs, forums, social-nets etc.)
• Growing API integration with enterprise systems like CRM and analtyic
platforms

Transformative: Buddy Media Platform
• SM production/management system
• Facebook and Twitter client integrated
• Listening capabilities
• Real-time SM campaign analytics

Where is SMA headed?
• Increasing market demand for a “one-
stop”, hosted SMA solution will drive
rapid innovation and consolidation
- Likely to see horizontal and vertical
product segmentation: personal
productivity, SMB, enterprise,
industry, trade

Where is SMA headed?
• Custom builds by agencies, social
business consultancies other web
integrators
- Similar to custom CMS/email
solutions, “productization” of social
media management tools/dashboards
will be looked at as a revenue growth
area

Where is SMA headed?
• Consolidation among macro, micro and
specialized players
- Acquisition/mergers will increase as
aggregators are forced to integrate
growing social media properties/
platforms/features to retain/expand
audience

Where is SMA headed?
• Transformative players will continue to
load-on BI and contact-center
capabilities
- As SM listening/monitoring services
become commoditized, transformative
players will need advanced customer
intelligence and engagement features
to “grow” with paid client-base

Where is SMA headed?
• Social Customer Relationship Management
(SCRM)
- Existing and new CRM entrants are
introducing cloud-based platforms that
provide flexible integration with social media
and other enterprise systems (SFA, CMS
etc.) that leverages/enables peer:peer/
peer:pro dialogue

Where is SMA headed?
• Google/Facebook
- Both have the audience scale and
technical resources to become a
defacto aggregation hub (i.e.Google
Wave/Analytics/Social Search and
Facebook Connect)
- Over time will develop and/or
acquire in-demand social media
features

Continuing down the SMA path
• Prioritize current/future needs
• Evaluate tools from a business and
technical administration perspective
• Don’t overlook aggregation/syndication
features within existing social-nets
• Product reviews, social bookmarks,
survey responses - they’re all part of
the mix

Thank You
keith@krgmarketing.com 503.957.0264 twitter.com/keithgerr