Moderator: Steve Sieck, President, SKS Advisors, Inc.
Panelists:
Bob Carrigan, CEO, IDG Communications, Inc.
David Mather, President, Hoover's
Michael Dunn, VP , Hearst Interactive Media
Clara Shih, AppExchange Product Line Manager, Salesforce.com

[Technical difficulties at the beginning at this panel, apologies to early speakers]
Steve framed the discussion by referring to his research for the SIIA showing the gap between social media's payback versus focus.
Steve: Why focus on social media?

Carrigan: Have to focus on it, need more editorial impressionsy
Dunn: Focus on it intensely
Mather: Provide tools to make more actionable informaiton, how to give value when you're entering into conversations in your professional activities. Hoover's Connect, purchased technology from VisiblePath
Shih: AppExchange investment but also online community IdeaExchange, Salesforce to Salesforce, entity nodes can be your sales partners, exchange information. FaceForce integration, pull up contact info but also Facebook profile information real-time into SFDC.
Carrigan: TheHub, generates thousands of visits and page views, all comments from users, very high monetization. Direct advertising benefits.
Dunn: Small teams can do a lot, low-cost efforts can yield high benefits with a lot of feedback from the community.
Mather: People want to be tethered to their workflow, were making so many changes to incorporate privacy that they needed absolute control over platform to manage these issues.
Shih: Keeps people from having to log into multiple sites, keeps them productive.

Steve: Social media communities don't happen by themselves, what do you need to do?

Carrigan: Don't hold on too much, can't be too regulated. Didn't hire a community manager initially, hired a CIO. Need to put in people that community members will relate to.
Dunn: On the boards of several companies, including Internet Capital Group, if you're considering moving into social media technologies first you should be getting on B2C networks, people want to interact constantly. Lots of evil things out there but that's an educational issue. Facebook is a good platform, Twitter good group chat, Seesmic is video chat in alpha. Lots of people involved in these sites, bring this back into your work environment.
Mather: Once people have the sense that it's a secure environment they play a little bit and start to get confidence. People begin to tap into your own organization's knowledge network for business-like goals. People will use it in the right context.
Shih: Trust is key, openness also, engagement. The content and services have to provide ongoing value, or they won't log in again.

Steve: Google OpenSocial, implications?
Shih: A set of open standards that publishers can use to build applications on social networking platforms, implementers can implement once and have data shared on many sites, remains to be seen whether people will go for it and whether publishers will be implementing it on their end.
Mather: As a publisher of insight, need to provide a 360 view of the world, if you are learning about a person you may want to know that Hoover's says versus LinkedIn versus MySpace. Standards can help us to unleash the power of these platforms.
Carrigan: From a user point of view there's OpenID, too many logins for social media, OpenID can help.
Dunn: Blogosphere is the largest social network today, you control the data, you're responsible for comments and trackbacks. In a Facebook environment you can't eliminate yourself and put it elsewhere, that's a challenge, data portability can address that. Every environment requires a profile, redundant, quite a bit of fragmentation, everyone has a little different feature set, everyone should have an about page, not worry about companies managing that.
Shih: Standardization is good, but sometimes profiles need to be separate, what if you're a musician on the weekends and want a separate identity.
Mather: Standards are good, but need to be careful about having too many controls.

Steve: 99 percent of SM applications are amusement oriented so far, what are some of the business widgets that may turn out to be killer apps.

Carrigan: We're working on lots of widgets, now career widgets, content related to career events, review widgets, looking at many cool business widgets.

Question: To what extent are lawyers getting involved on specific terms for social media.
Dunn: On same floor as lawyers, go to lunch with them, get advised on absolutely everything that we do. Launched a magazine completely in a blog format, lawyers help a lot.
Mather: Attorneys needed for Web tool world, how reliable are we when a blogger that says something in detriment to another company, they want us to filter everything, but hard to do in a community environment. Lots of rules in place, but sometimes we have to push the envelope.

Question: Looking at demographics, are there are demographics that resonate most? Tech or other industry?
Carrigan: Skews to younger audience, try to get the same quality, don't qualify as much as we do for print format.
Shih: Two phenomena, grown from Silicon Valley, which is young, but the audience is aging, as college students. mature they become the business consumers of the next generation.
Dunn: If your B2B footprint is global, social media can help you to break down social and time barriers. China is a bit rougher, tech community is an early adopter.
Mather: Much older audience than typical internet company, C-Level exec at D&B, do you know anyone, not a Silicon Valley type, intuitively jumped to use the tool.

Question: ROI?
Shih: Can calculate spend for partners, can close the data when deal is done, SFDC needs to do that to maximize value.
Carrigan: Journey of buying behavior, score provided to marketers in reporting, so if signed up for a program they can see that not all of the leads are created equally, new program. Market Fusion site.
Mather: Hoover's Connect is a free network, ROI in value of relationships, can manage private networks and provide economic benefit. Add value, make product actionable.

QUICK TAKE: Excellent panel, I thought that it was a great mix of core B2B people, representing publishers, enterprise platforms and new models that are spanning the world outside of and inside of the corporate firewall. Clearly it's very early days for social media in B2B, many of these initiatives have emerged fully only in the past few months. But the trend is to empower people in business to harvest value from their core professional relationships as well as to pull in their more multidimensional selves from social media online portals to help relationships become deeper more quickly and more effectively. The next generation of applications is likely to start mining social media content more effectively to provide alerts, trends, behaviors and other key indicators that can effect both relationships and transactions. If there's anything that can refute the question of social media's value it's what's happening in business.

Labels: business information, SIIA Information Industry Summit 2008, social media