Jeremiah Owyang and R “Ray” Wang of Altimeter Group have published Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management. This should answer a lot of questions companies may have about utilizing social media in a pragmatic way.

The subtitle is 18 Use Cases That Show Business How to Finally Put Customers First, and the purpose of the study is to help companies find an “organized approach using enterprise software that connects business units to the social web – giving them the opportunity to respond in near-real time, and in a coordinated fashion.”

Owyang writes: “Regardless if you’re in IT or in a business unit, we wrote this to meet the needs of both groups. This architecture lays out all the possibilities (18 use cases) defines the problem and goal for each, and suggests some vendors to watch. It’s also pragmatic, as it lays out a process on how to get started, baseline needs (listening) and what to do next.”

The full report is below:

Today at the 2010 KC/IABC Business Communicators Summit, Spiral16’s Phil Ocampo and Alex Midgley presented a breakout session on the value of social network visualizations to businesses.

Thanks to the KC/IABC for inviting us–it was a lively session and Phil and Alex walked everyone through a 3D visual map of the Conan vs. Leno insight we ran just recently. If you were there, you got to see a 3D social media visualization in action. (If you go to the Conan/Leno blog, you can get interactive with it on the website as well.)

Phil and Alex also demonstrated how social network visualizations can be applied to offline data sets by delving into a 3D visualization of quick service restaurant (QSR) customer surveys from different store locations.

Here’s the session description and the PowerPoint from the presentation below:

You’ve seen the graphics—a cluster of colored spheres with seemingly random connections between them, spread out in empty space like a spider’s web. In actuality, it’s not random at all, but a 3D visual map of the links between the key influencers on the Internet talking about your brand. This session will help you understand how to identify the most influential conversations, measure the brand reach of a message, and understand where positive and negative “hot spots” are within your ecosystem. Before you engage with key influencers, you have to first determine how to prioritize your engagement opportunities, and visual mapping is a great place to start.

After last Wednesday’s unveiling of the new Apple iPad, there were certainly a lot of opinions flying around on the Internet.

What surprised me, however, after running a sampling of relevant URLs with Spark, was the amount of anticipation and buildup for the product.

Using our proprietary influence algorithm (which takes inbound links, domain influence, persistence, and search source abundance into consideration), the number-one most influential URL is a category in the Business Insider for “Apple Tablet.”

Look at the screenshot from our 3D visualization and you’ll see the URL right in the center of everything and the other URLs that link to it in the surrounding area.

From there, you can also see the other URLs with inbound links and how that influence spread throughout the Web.

Internet chatter about the iPad began long before last week.

After weeding out spam and non-relevant posts, the average sentiment line graph to the right compares the positive and negative sentiment about Apple’s impending new product during the month of January.

Much of the talk surrounding the iPad concerned what it would be named when Apple finally introduced it. (The word “iPad” was only 11.4% more prevalent than the word “tablet” throughout all the URLs.)

As you can see, positive and negative sentiment was generally even with small amounts of flip-flopping up until the announcement on Jan. 27.

As the total amount of Internet posts fluctuates after the announcement, the positive sentiment continues to outweighs the negative by anywhere from 23% to 46%.

Our automated sentiment extractor finds examples of the most overt sentiment in all relevant posts. Of the 2,500 sentiment extracts up to Jan.31, Spark found that over 45% were negative and over 54% were positive (see screenshot to the left).

When you change that date filter to reflect Jan. 27 to Jan. 31, positive sentiment increases just over 4% and negative sentiment decreases by just over 4% as well (see screenshot to the right).

It’s pretty obvious that Conan O’Brien’s audience skews younger than Jay Leno’s, so naturally one would assume that Conan supporters are more active online and in social media. (From what we learned in our Conan/Leno sampling, that assumption is correct. Scroll to the bottom of this post to view our 3D data virtualization.)

Using our web-based listening and measurement tool Spark, we ran two different topic insights on the late-night controversy. One was Conan-centric, the other skewed towards getting more Leno results.

There were some interesting takeaways from this sampling and by using our visualization tool, we were able to find tons of quotes from both the social media hemisphere and elsewhere.

As of 10am EST on Thurs. Jan. 21:

• The topic with more Conan-centric key phrases like “I’m with Coco” and “Team Conan” (and the term “Conan” listed first) had more than twice the number of URLs in it (55%) than the “Team Leno” topic.
  
  Conan sampling = 4,061 URLs
  Leno sampling = 1,829 URLs
• TMZ was the 5th most influential domain in the Leno insight with 36 URLs (suggesting that it used more Leno keywords to promote its posts), while The Huffington Post was the 9th most influential domain in the Conan-leaning insight with 28 URLs. Interestingly, neither domain appeared in the Top 10 influential list of the opposing camp’s insight.
• According to Spark’s proprietary influence ranking and the 3D data virtualization, the main page of the fan-formed Conan-supporting Facebook group I’m With Coco is far and away the most influential URL.
• Our automated sentiment sampler pulls out the most overt sentiment samples from relevant URLs. Both sets of samplings had overwhelmingly negative sentiment: The Conan-centric insight had 68.19% negative sentiment while the Leno-centric insight was 76.87% negative.

Here are some extracts that were automatically brought back by Spark:

Come on NBC — ADMIT IT — The Jay Leno show is the show that is FALLING IN RATINGS — but in Hollywierd there is power in money and in coersion, so Conan gets screwed and he gets ousted.

There were a few months between Leno’s and Conan’s shows. Folks tuned elsewhere during that time. Conan then has to start his show when NBC is doing worse than ever; his lead-in is weak.

And as much as you fault Conan for losing ratings, Leno’s primetime show has BOMBED and it’s killing local newscasts because it’s a terrible lead in show.

Jeff Zucker sucks, Leno isn’t funny and Conan will walk away with a ton of money for his “humiliation”.

Then, when the time came for Leno to pass the show to Conan, they realized that Jay, the biggest name in late night, could go elsewhere and compete with Conan, so they made this mess. Jay’s show was #1, and they fired him… Now poor Conan has to deal with it.

If Fallon didn’t suck so bad, I would say that Conan is tainted goods at this point…but not when you’re comparing him to Leno and Fallon.

Listen up, NBC: Get Jay Leno back, forget Conan O’Brien to straighten out mess

Using the 3D virtualization, which visualizes all of the URLs as spheres and gives each sphere a sentiment-based color (green, red, gray for positive, negative, and neutral), it’s easy to see the most influential URLs.

Here’s a screenshot of the “Conan vs. Leno” virtualization, with the Facebook group smack dab in the middle.

-Click on any sphere to see the details of that URL. If there is a number before “conversation,” click on that to see an overt sentiment sample.
-Click on the dead space, hold down button, and move mouse to rotate the view of the virtualization.

A new ebook compiled by Seth Godin is being passed around the Web right now, and it contains some really useful and reflective thoughts. In our workday, we often get bogged down by heavy workloads and sometimes feel like there’s never a time to look up and take stock of what you have and what you’re doing with it.

The end of the year is the perfect time to slow down and consider this.

The book is available as a free download and is entitled What Matters Now. It features contributions from forward-thinkers like Guy Kawasaki, Gary Vaynerchuck, Mitch Joel, “Eat, Pray, Love” author Elizabeth Gilbert, and new tech thinker Kevin Kelley.

Each author was asked to pick a provocative word and riff on it for a little bit. Besides deep thoughts on business and life in general, there is also useful information for brands looking into the future. This quote ties into the idea of giving away an ebook for free:

When talking of the shifting concept of ’social media’ customer service, Vaynerchuck’s quote was particularly interesting: “I believe the ‘thank you’ economy will become the norm in 2010 and beyond, and brands that fail to adjust will be left out in the cold.”

Have a great holiday and please download or browse What Matters Now below: