Questions with Mark Rogers, CEO of Market Sentinel

Market Sentinel are kindly sponsoring Social Media Week London.

Mark Rogers spared us a few moments of his time to answer some questions about Market Sentinel, Social Media and the future.

Tell us about your background and how it translates into your business’s major goals for 2011. Back in the nineties I was the commissioner of the BBC’s online communities project. I was amazed by the kinds of strange phenomena we saw in that project. The EastEnders forum was overrun by 11 year old girls, to the exclusion of everyone else! Soccer fans were less tribal online than offline. It was a feast of uncollected sociological information.

Since I began Market Sentinel, collecting online conversations on behalf of big brands and turning them into insights, I have become more and more fascinated by what can be done with social media as a resource for generating insights into human behaviour, particularly around brands. This is the area we will be exploring more in 2011.

Why did you get involved in Social Media Week? We are doing a lot of innovative work which we want to share with the world! Social Media Week is a great opportunity to do that and to hear from clients, friends and competitors about their ideas and enthuasiasms.

What do you see as the big trend for 2011? Knocking Facebook and running down the social media fad! Seriously, as the LinkedIn IPO approaches and the Facebook one comes hard on its heels, we are going to see a lot of hard questions being asked about the return on investment of social media for advertisers.

The value of paid search has been demonstrated. If someone is searching Google it’s pretty clear from research that they are looking for something and that there may well be an opportunity to sell them goods or services. If I go onto Facebook or Twitter, I am looking to connect with my friends – that’s pretty different! The big question that Facebook will need to answer to justify a valuation of well north of $50bn – since that was the value of the last funding round – is: is social networking an activity that can result in transactions for advertisers? If the answer to that is, not necessarily, or if the answer is that it is more about building the emotional contexts of brands, then it is going to be hard for Facebook, based on their existing ad model, to justify those fancy valuations.

Facebook are going to need to be more much directed in demonstrating the value of their real estate to advertisers. And analytics companies like Market Sentinel will reap the benefit because we measure the thing that Facebook offers advertisers: networks linked by shared interests and passions.

What platforms are you really excited about? Facebook, really. Facebook is the eBay of communities in the sense that it has the lion’s share of attention and membership, which makes it most attractive to new members. Like any broad platform it doesn’t cater for everybody and start ups like Quora show that you can build highly useful niche communities elsewhere.

What are you looking forward to seeing most at Social Media Week? I am really excited to hear the case studies from the big brands in this area – the P&Gs, the Unilevers and the Pepsis. Where are they experimenting today they will be spending big tomorrow.

Where do you see the future of social media? For social media to deliver the real commercial potential it has to be integrated with search – where is the best plumber? Who is the potential buyer for my services at Company X? If any of us can start delivering the answers to those questions we are going to build companies that will one day compete with Google.

Market Sentinel are sponsoring Measuring Social Media 2011 on Friday 11th Feb, 10.45am – 4pm.

Measuring Social Media 2011 combines an Ask the Experts Clinic – a panel session with case study and global insight will explore the current metrics landscape with valuable insight what’s around the corner, plus lunch and a spot of networking. Market Sentinel will also be offering, in-depth one-on-one sessions with their social media measurement experts.