This morning Awareness announced a new module for the Social Marketing Hub called the Social Intelligence Dashboard.  The new module is a single solution for measuring all social and non-social marketing activities through one interface.

Why is the Social Intelligence Dashboard both cool and valuable?

Marketers are exposed on a daily basis to an overwhelming amount of data – both from social channels and from traditional marketing tools like marketing automation platforms, email systems, web analytics tools, CRM systems and more. The challenge is how to sift through all this data and figure out what it all means.  This tsunami of data has left many marketers and wondering, ‘what is the value of social media?‘

This new module gives marketers the ability to create their own reports and dashboards by combining data from multiple sources like Salesforce.com, Omniture and Google Analytics – into one interface providing the details they need to go beyond the standard social media measures like number fans or followers to metrics that provide insights into their social marketing programs.

Deeper Social Intelligence

The Hub absolutely provided some of the insights available in the social intelligence dashboard before.  The big difference the Social Intelligence Dashboard provides is flexibility.  It provides a simple interface to create new reports and dashboards based on business needs and allows you to tie in non-social data to get a clearer picture of your overall social activity.

The new interface allows you to modify out of the box reports while providing the ability to create new one through a simple drag-and-drop interface.

It also gives users the ability to access, export and manipulate the raw data which provides the ultimate flexibility for brands who want to use a separate 3^rd party business intelligence tool to get to the core of their social media activities.

One other cool feature is the amount of export options.  Each report contained with the dashboard can be exported to Excel, Powerpoint, PDF or CSV giving marketers the flexibility to format the data any way they see fit.

Why I’m excited about it?

I’m not only one of the people that sell the Hub, but I am also a user.  I’m excited because in the time we have been utilizing the Social Intelligence Dashbaord – throughout the beta process and beyond – we have already been able to uncover insights that have changed some of our social media activities and how we market our products and brand.  This like really understanding our conversion from social channels to our sales pipeline, who are our influencers and understanding content performance across each channel over time have provided new insight on how we market.  I’m mostly excited to see the impact it will have on all our customers.

Want more details?

You can check out this video and also stop by our social intelligence dashboard demo webinar this Thursday at 3PM.

How do you Maximize Engagement across the social web?  That was the question I was asked during an interactive panel discussion at SXSW.  Joining me on the panel was a team of marketing and engagement experts including, David Meerman Scott, Eric Qualman, David Carter, Chris Heuer, Paul Gillin, Brian Solis and Peter Fasano.  We met at the Social Media Clubhouse to discuss this topic in detail and chat about how brands using the Social Media tools to engage with their customers.

The complete video footage is below.  Hope you enjoy the discussion!

Who knew that talking to a crowd of Yankees fans could be so much fun?  Last week I led a discussion at Web 2.0 in New York titled “The Elephant in the Room: Social Media ROI”.  After catching some flak from the locals on being a die hard Red Sox fan we got down to business and discussed ROI.  During the talk I walked through a case for ROI and presented some case studies from companies I have worked with in the past.  The conversation sparked some interesting questions, some debates and a lot of interesting dialog.  I’m hoping to have a recording up in a few days (stay tuned)… The slides from the presentation are below, hope you enjoy!

Last Thursday I hosted a panel live from the Inbound Marketing Summit titled: “End the Social Media Hype“.  It was particularly exciting for me for a couple of reasons.  First, it featured an all-star panel of individuals that I have a lot of respect for in the social media space: Jason Falls, Paul Gillin, C.C. Chapman, Chris Brogan, and Brian Solis.  Second, it was the only panel to be streamed live from IMS – thanks to our friends at Visible Gains (formerly PermissionTV).  We had a great conversation, shared some interesting case studies and had a deep discussion on metrics and social media ROI.

I want to thank all the panelists for their time, honesty and insights during the session, Visible Gains for providing the streaming technology and Justin levy from New Marketing Labs for helping to pull everything together.

Below is the link to the session and I hope you enjoy it.

End the Social Media Hype

Finally, a special thanks to Matthew Mamet and the team at Visible Gains for helping to bring this session together on such short notice! As you view the highlights notice that the video has been edited to focus on the areas that are most interesting to the viewer. This is both cool and beneficial as is makes for an awesome viewer experience. If you are looking for software to support streaming video, I highly recommend taking a few minutes to check them out.