After the longest winter I can remember, it's finally getting nice out in New England and it seems summer is finally around the corner. Along with the weather, the market's interest in social intelligence is heating up, too. I'm filling my days talking to marketers interested in using social media data to inform their business strategies.

As a result of this growing interest, I'm hitting the road in June to share my research. Along with a packed series of client and vendor visits, I have a few events coming up that I hope you can attend:

• On June 8th, I'll speak at MeasureUp — a conference dedicated to marketing measurement. My session is on "Social Network Analysis" and covers the theory and practice of understanding your customers through the combination of their online conversations with social network connections, all made possible through the customer database.
• On June 16th, I'll speak at the Vocus User Conference, in a session titled "Combining Public Relations With Customer Intelligence." In this talk, I'll speak about the different ways social media data is driving a revolution for the PR industry.
• On June 20th, I'll lead a session with Forrester's Customer Intelligence Leadership Board (our networking community of CI professionals) on new trends in customer influence. For this session, I'll share some of the data I showed at SXSW this spring and give a sneak peak at my upcoming research on identifying, measuring, and utilizing customer influence.

Join us again for this week's #IMChat, a weekly tweet jam hosted by the interactive marketing team at Forrester. We know that social media is important to you – during last week’s tweet jam about your digital initiatives, the term came up more than 20 times. So today, our conversation is on social media measurement. We’ll talk about existing challenges and ask how your peers are breaking through them. We even have a social media measurement pioneer, Nichole Kelly from FullFrontalROI, on hand to offer her ideas about how to make social marketing accountable.

To participate, just follow the #IMChat hashtag at 2:00 p.m. If you’d like to learn more about the rules of engagement, visit this community discussion on The Forrester Community For Interactive Marketing Professionals. To read some past archives, visit the documents section of the same community.

Here are some of the questions we'll be discussing during today’s tweet jam:

1.       What are you current challenges with measuring your social media initiatives?

2.       What tools do you use to measure social media today?

3.       What social media metrics resonate with your CMO today?

4.       Are there other marketing metrics that your senior leadership understands and appreciates?

Some of you were looking for me, Peter O’Neill, at Forrester’s IT Forum 2011 in Las Vegas last week. My apologies; I was originally advertised as speaking at this event, but we decided to keep me in Europe after all, where I contributed to the first of a series of two-day partner trainings being run by Dell around the region (see my previous blog post on the topic). I will definitely be at the Forrester’s IT Forum EMEA 2011 in Barcelona next week though: I have four presentations to make and look forward to many interesting one-on-ones with tech marketers in between that packed schedule.

I wasn’t too upset about missing Las Vegas; ‘tis not my favorite place — did you know that I am invited to visit Las Vegas around six times a year? Clearly, I cannot attend everything as I must also do my day job: working inquiries, writing reports, and providing advisory; so my rule is to visit each vendor’s event every two years. Missing Las Vegas also meant I could go to the Ariba Live 2011 customer conference in London last Wednesday, which fascinated me because Ariba was one of the software vendors I worked with very closely back in my HP days in the late 90s. I was involved in several exciting eBusiness joint ventures then (BroadVision, Intershop Communications, and Yahoo were my other projects) most of which were really too visionary for those times. Ariba’s, and HP’s, vision was of an electronic procurement process running as an intranet application supported by Internet-wide directories and exchanges of suppliers.

Since the dawn of mobile commerce, retailers have dreamed of leveraging mobile phones to deliver an immersive multichannel experience for in-store shoppers. And finally the time seems right. With the uptake of smartphones, it has become much easier for both consumers and retailers to add mobile phones to the purchase process. Retailers have been busy developing mobile web versions of their online stores as well as dedicated mobile shopping applications for iPhone and Android phones.

But how many consumers are using their mobile phones for shopping-related activities? Our Technographics® research shows that about 6% of cell phone owners have used a shopping application. Dedicated shopping applications that allow consumers to research and purchase products directly from their phones, like the ones from Amazon.com or Domino's Pizza, drive uptake and usage.

It is tempting for retailers to use this technology solely for marketing purposes; however, organizations should focus on services that enhance the customer's multichannel experience. Balancing informative notifications with marketing offers will build trust with customers and lead to better acceptance, as well as higher uptake.