While many in the social media business hang on every Gartner Magic Quadrant or Forrester Wave, doesn't this seem a rather unsocial way to evaluate social solutions? Sure, those research firms do a very thorough and objective job of assessing the platforms, but their approach is akin to the Golden Globes (which only has 93 voting members) in an era when million of reviews can be found on sites like Rotten Tomatoes, Yelp and TripAdvisor.

For a more social perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of Social Media Management Software (SMMS), TrustRadius has released its free report of crowdsourced evaluations. The TrustRadius Buyer’s Guide includes a detailed review of products by use case, culled from more than 400 authenticated end-user reviews of 23 social media management products.

TrustRadius's latest report is structured in a very smart way that accounts for the three predominant use cases for enterprise social media: customer care, social intelligence and marketing. "Social media programs are now enterprise-wide and no longer confined to marketing," notes Vinay Bhagat, CEO of TrustRadius.

Out of the 23 SMMS platforms evaluated, all laid claim to being a marketing platform, and for the most part, users agree, with end users mentioning 21 of the vendors in terms of marketing solutions. The outcomes for the other two use cases were far less uniform: Nineteen of the platforms identified themselves in the listening space, but users agree for only eight of those platforms, and 17 of the SMMS companies associated themselves with the customer care use case, but users only identify seven in this category.
 

Social Customer Care

The TrustRadius report defines some of the special needs for social customer care, such as the ability to view entire customer interaction histories and integration with CRM systems. The Buyer's Guide notes that Brand Embassy, Conversocial, Hootsuite Enterprise, Lithium Social Web, Spredfast Conversations, Sprinklr, and Sprout Social offer "true high-volume, enterprise examples of social customer care, based on statements in reviews on TrustRadius."

The report includes comments from enterprise leaders addressing how these platforms help them resolve the unique needs of customer care in social media. For example, David Tull, customer engagement manager at JackThreads, reports that "Conversocial allowed us to work 7-10X faster than we had previously," and Comcast's Bill Gerth notes that "Within five months of launching Lithium Social Web, we were able to justify a 30% increase in staffing through the use of clear and concise operational reporting."
 

Social Intelligence

The TrustRadius Buyer's Guide guide identifies two dozen features that organizations seek when selecting an SMMS for social intelligence. It also conveys some specific user insights about the best platforms for this use case, including Attensity, Brandwatch, Netbase, Radian6/Salesforce Social Studio, Sprinklr, Sysomos and Viralheat. For example, Will Hall, digital analyst at Waggener Edstrom, says, “Brandwatch has given us a quantifiable way to prove ROI to our clients.
 

Social Media Marketing

The TrustRadius report notes the distinction between the marketing use case and the other two: "Whereas customer care is focused on using social media to engage with customers and resolve issues on their terms, and social intelligence is focused on leveraging the vast amount of conversations available in social media for various business purposes, social marketing is generally about using social media for brand amplification."

For the Marketing use case, TrustRadius identifies eight separate use case definitions and matches each platform's claims against user observation. For example, almost all platforms claim to assist with Lead Generation, but only two--Salesforce Social Studio and Viralheat--are mentioned by users for this need. Other marketing categories that TrustRadius includes are Community Management, Publishing, Campaigns/Promotions, Influencer/Advocacy, Content Marketing/Curation, Analytics/Optimization and Paid Media Management.

Many of the platforms receive attention in the Social Media Marketing section of the Trust Radius Buyer's Guide. HootSuite and Sprinklr are the two that stand out in terms of scale (which TrustRadius measures by page views on their platform and number of evaluations submitted). A social media and IT manager at a digital agency says of Hootsuite Enterprise, "The detailed analytics package not only lets us see how our campaigns are performing, but it also allows us to share detailed metrics with our clients to justify the fees we charge them." And of Sprinklr, Frontier Airlines' Justin Macauley notes, "A big issue for us is understanding when to segment messaging through geo-targeting and when to push out blanket messages. Sprinklr has allowed us to test many different scenarios and to better understand what kinds of messages work best for what kinds of offers."
 

Conclusion

2015 SMMS ratings and frequency Source: TrustRadius

In terms of ratings across all use cases, the social media management platforms that score best are:

• Brand Embassy
• Conversocial
• Lithium Social Web
• Simply Measured, and
• Viralheat.

If you work in social media, you probably are already familiar with Gartner's Magic Quadrant on Social Software, Forrester's Wave on Social Relationship Platforms and Altimeter's report on Social Media Management Software (SMMS). Now social media professionals have yet another source to help in the selection and evaluation of the many competing SMMS options: TrustRadius has published its own guide to SMMS platforms.

In an approach reminiscent of Altimeter's "open research" methodologies, the TrustRadius report is both free and crowdsourced. It summarizes the experiences of actual social media practitioners, ranging from employees of large firms such as Dell and Hertz to professionals at agencies with fewer than 200 employees.

The source for this information is TrustRadius's website, which is a sort of Yelp for business software. The site permits professionals to share their observations and ratings of the business platforms they use. To increase trust, every reviewer is authenticated and every review vetted before publishing. TrustRadius has found the reviews the site receives are quite substantive, averaging more than 500 words.

Culling from the reviews and content offered by its users, TrustRadius has separated the plethora of SMMS products into seven primary use cases:

• Listening and sentiment analysis
• Publishing/engagement
• Promotions
• Curation
• Analytics
• Customer Care
• Social Selling

The report is interesting and valuable, but it has a couple drawbacks. First, the data upon which the guide is based is fairly thin--just 100 reviews of 36 different SMMS products. This lack of depth is more apparent in some categories than others; for instance, over a third of the product ratings furnished in the "Publishing Tools" category are based on just a single review. In addition, the limited number of reviews means that the ratings for each product do not vary from one category to another--Adobe Social may be better for "Publishing" than "Listening," but it is rated the same three stars in both categories.

The report acknowledges the limited input from users, noting, "While the volume of content does not yet provide the basis for a definitive sector survey, the insights from users are revealing and point to some broad directional conclusions." I expect TrustRadius will repeat this process periodically, and as more reviews are received, the depth and quality of the report will improve.
I also had questions about potential conflict of interest in some of the information furnished. For example, the CMO at marketing agency Penguin Strategies praises Oktopost, but a visit to the Penguin website reveals Oktopost is a client of Penguin Strategies.

Conflict of interest is always a risk with this sort of open source research, but despite the concerns, there are many ways the TrustRadius guide can be of assistance to social media practitioners, especially since the price (free!) is right. First of all, it helps to define the players in the SMMS space and aligns them to specific use cases, which can help define the candidates to consider early in an RFP process.

Second, while I would not base any decisions on the praise and criticism contained in the report, the user comments can help guide vendor selection research. For example, the knowledge that some users have concerns about spam in Radian6 results can encourage you to explore recent improvements in that platform's spam filtering.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly for both social media professionals and TrustRadius, this guide can lead readers into the TrustRadius website where much deeper information is found. Few of us base moviegoing decisions simply on star ratings, preferring instead to dig into reviews to tell if a given film might be appropriate and interesting. In the same way, social media practitioners can start by reading the report but then dig into TrustRadius.com's in-depth data.

For instance, the Sprinklr page on TrustRadius.com furnishes not simply the overall rating (4.25 stars out of 5) and nine user reviews, it also aggregates ratings in attributes such as "Likelihood to Recommend" (8.6/10) and "Performance and Reliability" (9.1/10). In addition, TrustRadius has a nifty feature that permits simple head-to-head comparisons of competing products, such as this page which stacks Sprinklr up against SpredFast.

The report is useful, but the real value of the report is to lead readers into the deeper crowdsourced information found on TrustRadius's site. As more social media experts take the time to review the tools they use, the value of TrustRadius will only grow.

Applications and websites are like brands--each has its own particular reason for being. Build products and services around that singular reason, and consumers are more likely to understand, accept and adopt those new features. However, if a software package, site or brand attempts to expand in ways that violate their one essential purpose, consumers can become confused and reject the new (or even the core) offering.

Cosmopolitan Magazine Yogurt, Smith and Wesson Mountain Bikes, Walmart luxury goods, and Barbie clothing and accessories for adults--all of these brand extensions (must have) seemed like good ideas at one time but failed. Facebook is now embarking on its own brand and functional expansion, and it will be interesting to see what happens as the social network pushes beyond its traditional sandbox.

From the start, Mark Zuckerberg has had a clear vision of what Facebook is and is not. The social network is designed to be the online place for your existing, offline relationships. Zuckerberg once said, "we're not trying to build a community — we're not trying to make new connections."

This focus on facilitating real world relationships versus new connections is evident in everything Facebook does. Facebook's commitment to being a place for real friendships explains the social network's limits on the number of friends one can collect, the way groups were designed to degrade if they became too large and the way friends could add one another to groups without permission. It is also is why every Facebook relationship is required to be reciprocal--both parties must consent before a connection is made.

Facebook seemed content to let Twitter be the social tool for amassing influence and thousands of loose connections while Facebook focused on those dozens or few hundreds of firm and meaningful relationships we value in real life. But with the entrance of Google+ into the social networking world, Facebook seems to be innovating rapidly and, perhaps, giving up its commitment to real relationships.

Today, Facebook made a significant change to the way connections are created. People can still choose to "friend" you, which requires you to approve the connection in order to establish the relationship, but now users can also activate a new "Subscribe" button for their profiles. This Twitter-like feature allows people to subscribe to an individual's public posts while excluding their private posts. For the first time, you can follow a person's public Facebook posts without reciprocity.  (I've added the subscriber feature to my profile, and you can learn more and add this button to your profile on the Facebook Subscriptions page.)

Third parties have attempted to launch apps that push and pull Facebook away from its core mission of enhancing real world relationships. For example, in June Monster launched BeKnown, a professional networking application for Facebook. The application earns just 1.4 million active users, a fraction of the 82 million monthly users claimed by LinkedIn.  Perhaps the low participation is due to flaws with the application, but it's at least equally likely that people just don't wish to make professional connections with bosses, vendors, suppliers and peers within the same network where they post their kids' pictures and personal data. All that may change now that Facebook has deployed new tools furnishing you control over who sees your posts and for permitting others to subscribe and not just friend you.

Although others have tried to launch expansive networking tools on Facebook, today's news represents the first time I've noted Facebook itself taking a step away from its traditional foundation of firm, real, personal relationships. Is this a strategic move on their part to increase usage further? A reaction to Google+'s Circles? Or a mistake? Time will tell if this brand expansion will go the way of failed ideas like Bic Underwear (really!) or successful brand expansions like Arm & Hammer Toothpaste.

What do you think? Will Facebook be able to attract influencers who want to reach tens or hundreds of thousands with their public posts? Or will Facebook undermine its core mission?

Help! Marc Andreessen has seen the future--and it frightens me.

Andreessen got the tech world talking last week with a stirring Wall Street Journal article entitled, "Why Software Is Eating The World." Andreessen, the visionary who co-developed the first widely used web browser and founded Netscape, has a strong vision for the future. "We are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy," he writes, and that makes him "optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies."

I fear Andreessen is right but also very, very wrong. It's not that I don't share Andreessen's vision of an interconnected world and the power of software; I do! But I fear he (as software gurus are wont to do) focused merely on the technical aspects and not the more vital underlying human, cultural and economic impacts.

I have concerns with Andreessen's analysis in ways both small and large. First, I think Andreessen gives short shrift to the importance of the hardware that stores, delivers, runs, displays and transacts his beloved software. After all, if hardware didn't matter, Google wouldn't have just dropped a third of its cash on Motorola, nor would Apple be so obsessed with controlling the entire front-to-end consumer experience.

I also believe it is highly debatable that Groupon, Skype and Twitter are, in his words, "high-growth, high-margin, highly defensible businesses." These companies may eventually earn those adjectives, but Groupon lost $103 million in the second quarter of 2011, Skype lost money five of the last six years and Twitter was profitable in 2009 but in the red in 2010. Plus, while Andreessen is quick to promote the success of specific software-driven companies that now are thriving, he seems to have forgotten the many that are gone or struggling--Pets.com, Flooz, eToys, Geocities, Peregrine Systems, Commerce One, Corel, MySpace, AOL, Wesabe, Andreessen's own Netscape and Microsoft (which in the last decade is off 20% while the Arca Technology 100 Index is up 109%), for example.

But it is not Andreessen's views on hardware and current valuations that are my greatest concerns; rather, I fear he has not truly considered software's future impact on the economy at large. Nor do I believe he has adequately valued the importance of people, customer service, brands and social media.

Marc Andreessen's Future is Gloomy

Reading Andreessen's article, I recalled a vision from Fritz Lang's striking 1927 film, Metropolis, where the managers live luxuriously above ground while the workers toil in horrifying conditions beneath the surface of the planet. Andreessen waxes at length of the wonders of software before breezing past software's sobering implications in a single paragraph. "Many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution... (They) will be stranded on the wrong side of software-based disruption and may never be able to work in their fields again." It's difficult for me to match Andreessen's optimism of future economic growth with his acknowledgment that so many will be left behind.

Andreessen seems to feel software is a zero sum game--people will lose their jobs, but that's okay (in the end) because "every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent." In Andreessen's vision, it will all balance once we can get a new generation of workers trained for high-tech jobs as "software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley." However, technology isn't zero-sum--as software increases productivity, it replaces those messy, benefits-demanding, sick-day-taking, raise-expecting employees. It is certainly true that today we lack workers with the right skills, but even if every displaced worker had in-demand skills, there still would not (and will not) be enough high-paying jobs to go around.

Andreessen's examples demonstrate software's effect on employment. He notes "Amazon is a software company" that was promoting digital books over physical books "while Borders was thrashing in the throes of impending bankruptcy." Borders is going out of business, leaving the 20,000 people they employed at their peak without jobs. Meanwhile, book-printing employment is down from 38,000 to 31,000 over the past decade, and it isn't difficult to imagine most of those jobs disappearing before 2025. And let's not forget the troubles of the independent bookstore--more than 1,000 bookstores closed from 2000 through 2007, leaving about 10,600 unemployed.

Amazon has not hired a number of people equal to those who've lose their jobs to online book sales and eBooks. Amazon employs 33,700 people, but only a portion of those are in the book business, and what do you suppose will happen to Amazon's employment when a majority of books are zapped to Kindles rather than being physically warehoused, picked, packed and shipped? The impact of Amazon's technology on Amazon's stock has been quite positive, but its beneficial impact on the overall economy is debatable. (And don't ask state revenue departments about the benefits they reap from Amazon--the company is fighting a state-by-state battle to avoid collecting sales tax in order to duck what Credit Suisse estimates would be a $581 million annual hit to revenues.)

The problem doesn't stop with Amazon and books. Andreessen also cites Netflix, which employees 2,200 people but has almost single-handedly put 7,000 video rental stores out of business. And he praises Pixar, a company whose creative output I revere, but which has also replaced scores of animation workers with more powerful, flexible and efficient animation technology. And Andreessen's list goes on to include online photo distribution sites that replace photo process workers, digital music systems that replace those employed in CD production, distribution and retail, and LinkedIn, which Andreessen predicts will "eat the lucrative $400 billion recruiting industry." (Does Mark realize that $400 billion primarily consists of people's salaries?)

Where's the Human in Marc Andreessen's Future?

Andreessen is correct--software is transforming the world, and it's just getting started. Computers even may replace those jobs you might have thought safe in our digital world. Did you watch IBM's Watson beat Jeopardy's two biggest all-time winners? How might organizations put that same sort of artificial intelligence and computing power to work? Robot journalists? Robot Soldiers? Robot investment managers?

What about the jobs of the 2.3 million people in the US employed as customer service representatives? Notes an IBM CTO, "Imagine if you had a system where you just called Watson, asked a question, and you get the answer in real time." Before you object and tell me you'll never have a conversation with a computerized service rep, take a moment to recall that 15 years ago many people mocked the idea that consumers would go online to make their own travel arrangements, apply for mortgages, access their credit card or bank account information, acquire news, watch TV or perform dozens of other online tasks that now are common.

If customer service can be automated, why not social media? Imagine tools that respond to customer tweets and posts with instantaneous emotionally and factually correct responses (with no risk of an accidental "F bomb" or sarcastic retort). Today we are waging a battle to make organizations more human, but might we be about to lose that battle to an army of bits and bots? Can interactions in social media be made more human than human?

I don't think so, because what Andreessen misses is that software isn't really the differentiating factor that separates the winners from the losers. Every company has adopted software, yet some fail while others succeed. Software may be integral to success nowadays, but no more than great leadership, smart and passionate people, differentiated strategies and brands, human interactions and great customer experiences.

What is eating the world isn't software; it's customer focus. The digital space has made comparison shopping, experience sharing and brand switching easier than ever, and that has forced companies to adopt new agile models centered on the needs of individuals rather than masses. That couldn't happen without software, but it still is just one piece of the puzzle. Andreessen is right--Amazon has mastered software--but the company's success isn't because of software. Just ask founder Jeff Bezos:

“If there’s one reason we have done better than of our peers in the Internet space over the last six years, it is because we have focused like a laser on customer experience, and that really does matter, I think, in any business. It certainly matters online, where word of mouth is so very, very powerful.”

Software can replace some human tasks; it can disintermediate distribution channels; and it may someday answer your questions when you call a customer service line. But software cannot compel you to care, make you root for it to succeed, encourage you to aspire to a higher calling, or convince you it has your best interest at heart. Humans, customer service, great experiences and the authenticity of social media are, to me, the antidote to the unfeeling efficiency of software.

Am I naive to think that software isn't eating the world and human empathy still matters? Perhaps, but I don't really like where Andreessen's path leads. I'm no Luddite, but I wonder who Marc thinks will pay for those Amazon eBooks, Skype services and ads that power Facebook if software progressively displaces millions out of the workforce.

The limits of software won't be reached because Moore's Law taps out or due to other technical roadblocks; instead, software can be put into its proper place with the words, "I care." I care... to conduct business with an enterprise that gives me better and more compassionate customer service. I care... to pay a little more for the company that treats its employees better. I care... more for a company of people than a collection of servers. I care... about a brand that stands for something. I care...

Everything marketers and communicators can do to make people care--about your brand, employees, service and story--helps to make the future a little brighter and a little more human.