The Situationally Aware Business

The following is also my column on Forbes.com

As I write this column it’s the morning after the long Memorial Day weekend and the web is brimming with activity. Google searches are spiking for Ted Koppel, who’s 40-year-old son was tragically found dead. Twitter, meanwhile, is abuzz over WGM – short for the primetime Korean reality show “We Got Married”. This is perhaps a direct reflection of the service’s growing global appeal. Finally, over on Facebook word is spreading of a scam featuring what’s deemed as a “hilarious video”. A CNN news story on the hoax currently has over 10,000 shares.

All of these are disconnected events; a Polaroid snapshot of our psychology at a single moment in time. Some of these memes are ephemeral. Others may be lasting. However, our success as marketers increasingly hinges on having a deep, real-time understanding of our networked environment and how these themes can impact our programs. Enter situational awareness – an essential skill every CMO-level executive and their staff must build and evolve.

Situational awareness, according to Wikipedia, is “the practice of being aware of what is happening around you to understand how information, events, and your own actions will impact your goals and objectives, both now and in the near future”. It’s common throughout the intelligence community. The White House Situation Room, for example, operates a 24/7 Fusion Center that pulls together 3,000 sources of information into three daily briefings for the President. For more, see this fascinating short video.

What’s important to note is that situational awareness is not a substitute for client/brand monitoring, reporting or measurement. Rather, it’s a complementary set of processes that help you form gut insights that make marketing, public relations and/or digital engagement more efficient and effective.

Most CMOs will not need the intricate web of systems that the White House employs. Yet every marketer should be required to make situational awareness part of his/her daily workflow. It all needs to happen in a focused way, at every level and in both client and agency organizations. The good news is that situational awareness can be quite simple. The bad news is that very few people have created the daily systems or habits required to succeed. Here are three simple tools to add to your workday to get started.

Google Trends

Many marketers look first to Twitter and Facebook for consumer insights. However, they often overlook Google. This is a mistake. Far many more people search than those who engage on social networks. Therefore, Google knows more about you than your own mother. And, much the same, day in and day out it can tell us a ton about what we’re thinking as a society. The Google Trends home page is about as good a barometer as any for what the US and the world is thinking about right now. I try to check into this page several times a day. In many ways, it’s like a 24/7 supermarket checkout line.

Seesmic Web

One of my colleagues described Twitter as the new daily newspaper. A blogger who I met recently at a client event described it as “Google with a brain”. While Twitter’s audience pales in comparison to Google or Facebook, there’s no doubt it’s a critical treasure trove of information for what’s top of mind among opinion elites like the media, celebrities and influencers.

One of my favorite situational awareness tools is Seesmic Web, which only requires a browser to run and can sync with mobile device clients that the company has created for every platform. I keep the site open in a tab in my browser with various lists of people who serve as my window into the online world. Over time, this helps me build a deeper understanding of what makes this entire network and its micro communities tick.

ItsTrending

While it doesn’t have the same ecosystem of tools that Twitter supports, as Facebook slowly opens up its data it’s ushering in all kinds of new tools. Some of these are invaluable for helping us shape aggregated insights into the mindset of those who have elected to live more public lives on Facebook.

ItsTrending is one such tool. The free site data mines Facebook for the most popular links, images, news stories and videos on an array of topics. Several visits a day are all you need to develop a deeper sense for how Facebook themes and memes can impact your programs.

These are just three – there are hundreds of others, many of them are free. What’s key, however, is to find the right tools and package them into your workflow so that you have a gut feel for the various online environments you are engaging in daily and how the macro themes can play a role in success or failure.

Comments

[Brian Hayashi]

The President's Daily Brief, a precursor to today's sitreps, is a useful model for reviewing the environment. For example, it's amazing how many CVBs share information about meetings that are being held at the major convention center - but fail to share information about the many smaller events that are being held at area hotels. Interestingly, Google notes that people upload 15x more data today than they did just 3 years ago, and that every time their spiders index the web, 20% of the content is brand new. This suggests that businesses will need to establish daily routines to avoid information overload, but will need to periodically revisit those routines to see if new sources of data have become available.

[Daniel Berman]

Their was a small internet meme that was floating around several years ago called OSINT or Open Source Intelligence. Your starting to touch on it here. Should be interesting to see what it can become especially now with real-time status updates becoming much more popular.

[Corporate Social Networking So]

The need for awareness is what is driving many businesses to install corporate social networking software. It allows them to connect both internally and externally for that constant engagement and monitoring that has become increasingly important.

[watan]

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[watan]

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