Major Life Changes

Four weeks ago today marked the official end of the last 8.5 year chapter of my life and the start of the next very exciting one. May 24th was my last day at Tripwire. Tripwire was a place that gave me massive opportunity and space to grow. It was only my second job after leaving college and it gave me the chance to do everything from accounting and finance to running a business unit to pioneering the use of social media.

I enjoyed my time but it was time to move on.  I realized that I wanted to do something that my heart was in fully and I was deeply passionate about.  For me over the past few years that has been social media.  I love the technology, the people and the interactions.  I find the whole space fascinating and that is probably why I spend all of my free time working on some aspect of it.  

A few hours after my last day, I started a new company with my co-founder Nitin Mayande.  Nitin and I have been chatting for a few years and have been exploring this idea for about a year now.  As I implemented multiple social strategies at Tripwire there was always a gap in the data and analysis that I wanted to see to be able to make decisions.  Nitin has been studying social networks as part of his PhD over the past 5 years.  If you combine his research and understanding of social networks with my problem and vision you get something pretty special.  

Nitin and I are writting over at The Study of Social as we build this business.  We are working to bring businesses actionable data about their areas of interest on social networks to help them achieve their business objectives with the most impact and the best use of resources.  Big data, social interactions and technology -what could be more exciting!

Stay tuned for more.  I will be writing hear about various things as always but also documenting my journey over the next months and years.  It is exciting to get up every day and work on the things that get you excited.  

This is a huge change that is a little scary but it is massively exciting.  Thanks to everyone for their support.  I greatly appreciate it!

-Matt

The Study of Social

I have been working on formalizing a new project over the past few months which is why my blogging here has gone down considerably.  For about 18 months now I have been having escelating conversations with Nitin Mayande and John Wrobel on social media.  I read a ton on the subject and in many posts or conversations I want to jump in a debate things because there is so much room for evolution of the conversation.    (Also I like to debate - my wife hates it and my mom says I should have been a lawyer.)  Anyhow there is a ton to learn and explore on how social media works, how it impacts how people build relationships and how businesses adjust to this.  One of the biggest areas of improvement that can happen around this space is real data and science.

Because of the desire to jump into this conversation more fully with Nitin and John we have formed a new blog:  The Study of Social.  The intent is to bring multiple perspectives to this conversation.  We will be talking about social analytics, social network structure and the performance of the network.  I believe these items are all very critical to gaining a better understanding on the impact of social media.  Please check it out and let me know what you think.  I will still blog here about some things social, like tools or news, and buisiness items.  All of these items are starting to converge for me and continuing to discuss them is important to me.

I hope you have a chance to take a look and let me know what you think.

Thanks

Matt

A Great BrightTALK Presentation on Using Social Media for B2B Marketing.

I had a chance to check out this presentation on BrightTalk before I went on vacation last week. It is a really great talk about how businesses use social media in a B2B environment. There is a lot to take away from this even if you are not the size of Intel, HP or Cisco. I reached out to all of these speakers and they were all willing to chat on Twitter about my questions. The moderator asked my two questions in here - the first being the most important. I wanted to know how they used social media to build strategic relationships. This is the business value of social media to me which is the question I posed in my last post.

What is the Business Value of Social Media?

I have been using social media for business for about three years.  I love it and find the value imense but I have really been trying to get crisp on what is the value for business.  The ways that I use social media are very hard to tie to a sale or some solid ROI.  My view is that the world is changing and the way that business have to interact with customers and prospects are fundamentally changing.  This video is my thoughts on the subject. Please take a minute to let me know what you think and where you see the value for business.

Thanks

Matt

What I Learned In Social Media This Week

This week I have a couple of things.

1. Facebook Launches Places

The big news of the week was that Facebook announced a new feature called Places. This allows you to check in places through Facebook much like Foursquare of Gowalla. The feature that Facebook touts as different is the ability to tag your friends at certain locations. Here is the video that Facebook published explaining the new feature.

They are supposedly partnering with Foursquare and Gowalla but Foursquare has said that they are not sure how they will work with it yet. @Dens - Foursquare CEO - said that they are not that concerned with Places. But then again what else are they going to say. Here is a video from Mashable with the Foursquare VP of Mobile and Partnerships Holger Luedorf.

I am talking about Foursquare instead of Facebook because time will tell what people think of the new feature but location has been one of the hottest spaces in technology and Foursquare has been the golden child of that space. The most interesting thing to me is if this will change the landscape of this space considerably or if they will coexist. One note is that Foursquare had its largest signup day ever after this announcement.

2. Rowfeeder Has a Major Update

I talked about Rowfeeder two weeks ago. Right after that they released a major new release that really stepped up the sexiness of the product. They now generate 'native Excel files with pre-populated charts, visualizations and pivot tables'. The original beauty of this was that I could get the data in the raw format so that I could create whatever I wanted on top of that. I lived in Excel for 10 years so that is very comfortable for me. Now they just lowered the barrier for use even more by pre-populating some of the first use cases they are hearing. I have talked to these guys a few times and I can tell you they are pushing to continually improve this product and are gaining great traction. Nice work guys.

3. The Word Influence is Being Bastardized.

I will talk about this more as this is my real area of passion but the word influence and influencer is a term that is really getting abused. SO many people are talking about this and they are defining it in whatever way is convenient for their purposes but not necessarily in ways that will provide true value. There are a few companies that are trying to so metrics around influence but they are very 1.0 in their thinking. I have discussed this with a friend of mine about what the true roles in a network are and how you really measure them. There is a better way and over time I will be talking about the more and more here. This is a problem that there is real business value in discussing and solving, and this is an issue that were are working through at my day job currently. As companies start into social media this is a space that they are trying to get their arms around and the misuse of these terms are going to cause confusion and false starts for many companies.