Social Intelligence = Business Intelligence

Hello All –

Recently I have been hearing a fair amount of folks (conferences or otherwise) use the vernacular of “current awareness” to describe an effort to stay abreast of what’s being said about clients, prospects, industries, issues, etc.  However, the reality is that “current awareness” is really only 1/2 the equation, at best.  We here at Manzama are much more interested in what we like to refer to as “current understanding.”  That is, how can we help our clients develop more strategic and insightful reference points in and around clients, prospects, industries, etc.  An effort that, well, requires much more than simply building awareness.  It requires analysis, relative views and perspectives in and around information and so forth.  Accomplishing this can be done via outside editors, but it can also be accomplished with the use of tool to help one analyze and assess information on their terms.

Frankly, I had a hard time finding meaningful information on the topic of “current understanding” (click here for some helpful information ), so, perhaps the distinction is just important to me, but nevertheless, I believe it will not be the last time I use the term:).

All the best,

Peter

Last week we highlighted a few ways that users can use Manzama to establish and maintain thought leadership. I wanted to share another example of how you can leverage social media using Manzama.

It became widely known Monday that Yahoo has purchased the photo-sharing site Tumblr for $1.1 billion. Using Manzama, you would have known about this potential purchase since Thursday last week when rumors started hitting the tech blogs and Twitter. Expressed by the Manzama “Timeline Chart,” a user would have been able to notice a significant spike in blog and Twitter traffic around Yahoo.

The news exploded on the blogs and Twitter starting Thursday and throughout Friday. Illustrated here by a significant increase in tweets around Yahoo. When you click into they spike you learn there is speculation that Yahoo board of directors were going to meet over the weekend to approve the deal (before they received a competing bid).  The major spike in Twitter chatter occurred a full two days before major news outlets began running the story.

This is an example of how Manzama’s monitoring of a clients media mentions, media would have given a user a 2-4 day advantage over people relying on main stream media.

I recently had the opportunity to attend the ILTA Luncheon on the usability of Twitter in law firms. It reinforced why, here at Manzama, we focus on finding insights from social media platforms as well as major media sources. The focus of the gathering was how lawyers are not just using Twitter as a marketing tool, but also as a service to connect them to relevant information.  I wanted to highlight just some of the ways Manzama can help lawyers with finding and sharing specific insights within social media.

As lawyers find interesting content, they can repurpose it directly to Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook using the Manzama toolbar.  Repurposing content is a great way for attorneys to be seen as thought leaders and stay top of mind with clients and prospects.  This also gives lawyers a platform to interact and engage in conversation with other thought leaders in the area, providing deeper insight into the topic.

Manzama also allows individuals or teams (client/practice/industry) to monitor Twitter.  Because Twitter is the epitome of drinking from a firehouse, it is very hard to monitor information around clients, industries/practice or general topical areas (fracking or unmanned drones).  Manzama allows Twitter content to be filtered and narrowed bringing the universe of tweets down to a manageable level so that you can easily see  issues you care about graphically highlighted as spikes within discussions.

With Manzama, a lawyer has the ability to track an industry topic around a specific client. Often, mentions of a potential story breaks on Twitter long before it’s covered in the major media outlets. Having the ability to track a particular client mention via Twitter gives a lawyer the edge they need to proactively act on an issue. This slight edge could be a critical advantage needed to protect a client’s risk.

Hello All –

Last fall I had an opportunity to give the below presentation at a So. Cal. Legal Marketing Association (LMA).  The session was titled “serving up content,” not really exciting, but I took a different approach and focused on “social intelligence.”  The reason, so I surmised, was if you are good at social intelligence, then you will be a better content contributor of content to the web (blogs, twitter, etc.).  The analogy I chose to use was akin to Bees and how they are socially intelligent insects.  In any event, hope you find it enjoyable and informative.  By the way, the format was a lot like Ted Talks, 15 minutes and your off.  The video did not capture my powerpoint, so, I am attaching that herein as well for good measure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPB43Vudxn4

Here’s the accompanying Power Point: http://www.slideshare.net/pojo47/manzama-lma-92612

Enjoy,

Peter

Google Alerts Now Useless To Financial Marketers
http://thefinancialbrand.com/28346/google-alerts-broken/

“Starting sometime last year, The Financial Brand started receiving fewer and fewer Google Alerts. And when the Alerts did arrive, they contained fewer and fewer results. It’s gone from lots of Alerts, to many, to some, to a few… down to a trickle. Users can forget about creating any new Alerts — those pretty much won’t work at all. Indeed the volume of Alerts has decreased by at least 80%, dropping from 20-35 emails per day with 4-12 results each down to 4-8 emails per day with 1-3 results each. And the results are crummier than ever.”

For firms or lawyers depending on Google Alerts, they maybe getting even less value then they before, which, arguably may not have been getting much from before.

Google, the company that changed the way we get information and influences which information we receive,  just announced that they are retiring Google Reader as of July 1st, 2013. We read the headline when the news broke, and more importantly, waited for the reactions to the development.

Google Reader performs a part of one of the basic services Manzama provides: the aggregation of news feeds. Many professionals outside of Law rely on Google Reader to try and keep up to date on Industry developments. Think Google Alerts before you replaced them with Manzama Alerts. So it took less than 12 hours before those professionals reacted to the news of its demise:

Google Reader, please don’t go — I need you to do my job!

The author, Laura Hazard Owen, is a journalist that ranks a news reader as one of the top 3 essential apps for her job.  She ranks it higher than email (though predictably just below coffee).  Her story is not unique.  In order to perform our jobs today, we need a way to manage information, like Google Reader.  This axiom affect all of us, and each of us likely has a personal solution.

Manzama offers more.  We recognize the need to manage information as simply the basic business problem at the nexus of your new reality.  The reality is this: in order to excel at our jobs, we need a way for information to find us, like Manzama.

Manzama differs from other tools in that it can be trained to know something about you and to serve you what you care about.

Google may have lifted a motto from Caeser: Veni Vedi Vici (I came, I saw, I conquered)

Mannzama creates its own: Quid Vobis Curat (What you care about)

Recently Manzama was published in Marketing The Law Firm, an ALM Publication.  For those that subscribe to the newsletter, you can get the story in its entirety, but the genesis of the article was the “personalization of business intelligence.”  If I had to talk about the evolution of the consumption of business intelligence I would say the progression has evolved as follows:

• 1990s: Internet content usage creates new venues for companies and organizations to “message” what it is they care about — enter blogs, news sites, etc.  At this stage, information overload is not really an issue;
• 1995+: Content proliferation reaches critical point of “too much.”  Many industries (including the legal profession) begin to rely on third party providers/curators of information to get better intelligence on clients, practices, industries, etc.  For example, a firm might subscribe to a renewable energy newsletter to stay abreast of developments within that industry;
• 2000 – 2006/7:  Consumers of intelligence want to see more specifics, less interest in seeing what everyone else is getting via newsletter or alert.  Law firms begin to invest in “high-touch” organizations that curate content to various practice, client or industry teams.
• 2008+ :  Outsourcing curation gets expensive, especially in light of the fact that markets have become more “micro” in nature, users (including lawyers) expect to see intelligence that hits their inbox be relevant to their needs.  Typical alerts are too broad and it’s costly to get granular.  Technology starts to enter into the equation in late 2008.  The result is “personalized business intelligence.”  More and more this is what we hear from lawyers –help me understand the issues that are emerging, risk points and trending concepts within an industry, client, practice or theme in general.  Oh, and make it easy.  Tall order, but that’s the game we are in and it’s really a lot of fun.

All the best,

Peter

A colleague recently shared this post with me from Slaw (Canadian On Line Legal Magazine). The basic premise among other concepts discussed is that people do not want to “search” they want to “find” information, implying they don’t like to construct long queries, etc.    I’d like to take that thinking a step further and argue that people do not only not want to “find” information vs. created query upon query in hopes of locating the “knowledge” or “insight” that others are unable to locate, rather, the trend is moving toward “information finding you.”  Broadly speaking, the adoption of tools and user habits for professional and enterprise software users lags the consumer world.   Think “ease of use” and “social like features” first found in Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and later migrating to business/enterprise applications.  Along these lines, one trend we see here at Manzama is “information finding you,” think “Groupon” making its way into business/enterprise applications. This said, of course there’s still discernment with respect to “is this information valuable, once it finds me,” but the expectation is I am not always out there looking.

At Manzama we have strived to achieve this result from day one, and, not surprisingly, it’s not easy, but as we “learn more,” we can deliver a better result as well as contextualize these results vs. a long list of thousands of “possible stories of interest.”  Likewise, more and more, you’ll see what used to be a complex search (think boolean characters, parameter searching, etc.) become a part of the algorithms themselves, hence, even for the “searcher” this should reduce their efforts to find information.  Finally, we need to think of the information from a different perspective — that is a “relative” perspective.  That is, is what I just found an important  ”insight” to a few or to many?  And, how do I know this (think measurement, trend analysis, predictive analytics, source of information)?  As the bucket of information becomes larger (think Big Data), the methods to locate the knowledge and assess its value need to evolve.   For example, if one was able to see an increase in FCPA blogger discussions as pertaining to settlements with pharma companies  over the last three (3) months, is there an opportunity to get ahead of the issue and manage the risk sooner with your pharma/bio tech companies?

PJO

I often wonder how statistics like that from Harvard Business Review in April 2012: “Fewer than 44% of employees know where to find information they need for their day-to-day activities.”  At first glance, I say “so what?”  We seem to be a fairly productive society, or, so we believe.  However, the more time I spend analyzing issue and understanding the importance of data (and I am not talking just metrics on a company’s or firm’s performance — a lagging indicator), the more convinced I am that a deeper understanding of data across many perspectives = greater probability of success.  This said, it’s pretty clear to me that the range of investment and interest in leveraging data varies, sometimes this is evidenced by a firm’s commitment to understanding.  I’d like to share some data points on a summary I recently read on “Big Data, Why it matters — prove it,” from the Economist Intelligence Unit. I actually added the “prove it” part of this statement, but the articles describes the various levels of commitment an organization will devote to data and how that translates to success (or lack thereof):

• Data Wasters = “30% of data wasters don’t prioritize data collection.  Yet 70% collect data, and still severely underuse them.  These companies under-perform financially, and can be found in any industry.”

Quick facts: (a) suffer from poor alignment between business and IT; (b) far more focused on improving internal operations and far more focused on internal reporting in particular; (c) put mid-level managers in charge of their data strategies; (d) struggle with data management skills.

• Data Collectors = recognize the importance of data collection, but lack resources.

Quick facts; (a0) submerged in data; (b) most likely to put senior IT person in charge of data; (c) suffer from poor IT/Business Alignment; (d) struggle most with data quality, accuracy and reconciliation; (e) do not invest in “skills” to manage data.

• Aspiring Data Managers = Fully embrace importance of data for future.

Quick facts: (a) They allow data to inform strategic decisions; (b) companies in communication and retail space are most likely to be found in this category; (c) slightly less likely to put CEO in charge of this strategy; (d) currently leverage internal data, but hoping to put more data to consumer/client facing issues; (e) unlike strategic data managers, still struggle to clean and reconcile data; (f) 66% put only half of valuable data to use; (g) they are most likely to complain they have too much data and not enough resources.

• Strategic Data Managers = Most advanced.  Most often found among manufacturing, financial services and technology companies.  Strategic managers first identify strategy and then get data that helps them better understand how to get there.

Quick Facts:  (a) Use a high percentage of data they collect; (b) A C-Level exec runs their data operation; (c) invest heavily in all aspects of data management; (d) explore emerging data sets for value.

I suppose only a couple of question remains — where are you today?  And, if need to, how are you going to change your scenario?

All the best,

Peter

Greetings from the Manzama Content Team!

I recently stumbled upon a great definition for the word Search, which is at a basic level what Manzama does. The reason I found it interesting is that it explains how search becomes discovery – Manzama is not a search engine, but a discovery engine.

Search : Verb

“To look at or beneath the superficial aspects of to discover a motive, reaction, feeling, basic truth, etc.”
Ex: He searched her face for a clue to her true feelings.

Middle English: from Old French cerchier (verb), from late Latin circare ‘go round’, from Latin circus ‘circle’

Originating from the Latin circus? It does seem like searching does turn into a circus sometimes, because true search is complicated, nuanced, and personal. It is not superficial.

This is why Manzama takes such pains to help you get closer to what you hope to discover and to turn the complexity of your search into a basic truth that helps you.

But you are probably reading this from your desk in the midst of a busy day, so let’s move away from the esoteric and talk about something concrete.

What are some of the coolest searches in Manzama?

Manzama has over 100 Practice Areas, 40+ Industries, and thousands of clients preconfigured in our system. But there are also some ultra-cool Trackers set up that may help you starting today. Find them by typing in the global search bar on the top right of any screen.

Here are a few – Click on the title to preview:

Licensing Deal
This search helps you quickly discover when a company licenses rights to a patent or product, regardless of Industry. It is also very useful to use as a filter applied to an Industry such as Telecom or Pharma, Biotech & Life Sciences.

Professional Sports Stadiums
You know how difficult it is to weed through the NBA scores from the week to find real business intelligence related to sports stadiums. Check out this tracker that does it for you.

Social Media Policy
Monitor this tracker to keep track of these constantly revised policies and keep your clients informed or who is encountering issues that might affect them.  Narrrow by “violation” to drill down further.

Rules Regulations and Laws

This behemoth is best used as a filter applied against Practice Areas like Energy, where it can help you discover opportunities that are always created by change.

In addition to these awesome searches, make frequent use of the Quickfilters located at the top of any results page in Manzama. Finally, remember that you can narrow results by State or Country. Simple start typing in the Narrow By text box and select when it comes up.

Happy Searching, or shall we say…  Discovering!