I have written about Awareness, Inc. several times but it has been a while with the most recent in 2008 – Awareness Summer 08 Release Brings Sharepoint Integration and New Features. In those days they provided a comprehensive community platform. Since then they have transformed their offering to become a social media command center that allows you to properly manage all of you social media activity through a single source.

With increasing complexity of social media, this is a welcome capability. As Jeremiah Owyang recently pointed out in – A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation – global corporations are trying to manage an average of 178 business-related social media accounts. He adds, “The genie is out of the social media bottle and he’s creating new technologies and tools at dizzying speeds.” What we need are tools to manage this complexity and that is what Awareness is offering.

I recently spoke with Mike Lewis of Awareness about their capabilities. The Awareness Social Marketing Hub is built to address the challenges marketers face managing multiple social channels. It also allows for CRM integration so firms can record and track what is being said about them. For example, the US Major League Baseball (MLB) organization uses Awareness to track the social media activities of all its teams. This enhances their ability to sell tickets and merchandise through social media.

MLB can also monitor what is being said about all teams while each team sees only what is being said about their team. This allows each team to adopt their own social media strategy and policies. They can monitor and approve any messages before they go out. Each message has its own url for tracking purposes. You can segment your audience and add pictures and video. Workflow can be added for the approval process. You can track activity over time as shown below.

You can also immediately get data on those who are writing about you. See sample below.

Awareness can be used to support Facebook campaigns. You can control custom tabs in Facebook and add functionality. For example, you can allow a white paper to be downloaded from Facebook. You can get profile data from participants and have it automatically entered into your CRM system.  See a sample Facebook download screen below.

There is sentiment analysis on people, content, and channels. You can see some results below. You can also put a widget on your Web site that displays comments from social media channels and you can filter these comments. I think this offering is great service and a much needed one.

Now Awareness helped with the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl host city of Indianapolis has introduced a new way to service fans during the world’s biggest annual sporting event via its first-ever social media command center. Here is a sample tracking social media screen for the Super Bowl.

The Super Bowl XLVI Host Committee Social Media Command Center had 50 staff and volunteers working over the course of two weeks, in two shifts. There is a 2,800 sq ft. facility that seats up to 35 people. Within it is 9-screen monitor wall (over 100 sq feet) and 27² iMac Touch Down stations. See a portion of it below.

I see this happening for many major events going forward.