Social Analytics News & Articles

When the folks at PeopleBrowsr wanted to find outlets with which to share the news about its upcoming PeopleBrowsr Kred API launch, they turned to the very tool they were announcing to search for online influencers of topics related to social analytics. I was among those that they found and I was happy to oblige. 

At J.Boye 2012, it was made clear that sharing is caring. Whether it’s information about what’s working or what isn’t, it’s essential that everyone from development teams to sales and marketing to community managers share insights so as to help everyone innovate and make improvements. Session after session, valuable information about mobile web strategy, SharePoint development and web governance were shared, giving us great insight on how we can avoid pitfalls and work smarter.

May has proved beneficial for funding -- first SocialText and now DataSift. Hot on the heels of Big Data Week, DataSift is celebrating big funding with an announcement that it has secured US$ 7.2 million in a follow-on Series A round from existing investors GRP Partners and IA Ventures.

Content producers can use big data to their advantage when researching relevant ideas, search terms and keywords for their Web writing. Now, one company wants to make it even easier for writers to scour the Internet for the most searchable and insightful ideas that can make any marketing or publishing solution perform as needed. Inbound Writer has added a new module called Topic Buzz -- a Twitter analytics tool for cutting through the social network's stream of information.

Dachis Group not only announced that it is officially part of the new Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer Platform, but also some new capabilities in its own social analytics platform -- integration with Facebook's Insights API.

Recurrent themes popped up time and again at the Social Media Analytics Summit here in San Francisco, forming a picture of a nice, neat path towards success.

When any given business attempts to determine their social media strategy, they must first consider their goals. One would assume that they have already done their research and determined that investing in social is worthwhile -- but maybe that's a can of worms. Let's just assume it is.

It's no secret.  The majority of our efforts when it comes to social media are geared towards treading water. Businesses large and small are having enough trouble absorbing and analyzing data; the next step seems to be an abstract, unapproachable burden. That next step? Action. Monetization. Will this experiment start yielding positive results any time soon?

SMAS kicks off with some insight into the massive scale of social media data, and the difficult task of aggregating it.  Smart folks at Attensity and Gnip are among those attempting to sift through and determine how much can be done by machines and how much relies on human intuition. They are making progress, but is the vast ocean of data too far ahead of us?

Many engagement platforms can help organizations better identify social metrics, including influencers and competitors. Today, Socialbakers enters the fray with its Analytics PRO platform.

Today's inaugural Social Media Analytics Summit is the first two-day event to focus exclusively on analytics in social media. This begs the question: Why haven't we seen an event with this much focus and breadth on this topic, when it seems to be so essential to any budding enterprise?

When it comes to big data, just how much of it is used to leverage your site’s analytics? Thanks to the Dachis Group and its new SaaS product, Advocate Insight, you can monitor and measure the daily interactions in an effort to identify a brand’s most passionate and engaged customers across their social footprint.

Yesterday we told you about Adobe's new Social Marketing solution -- Adobe Social. Today I had the opportunity to sit in on more detailed session for the new product which carries the tag line "social marketing made simple".

Armed with its Optimization Technology, powered by applied mathematics and language analytics, along with the belief that language, not demographics or "influencer status," is the best predictor of social outcomes, SocialFlow announced it's moving from beta clients to to public availability of its Optimized Publisher.

Social business is about connecting users, partners and customers through purposeful conversation and collaboration and most importantly; it’s about integrating or weaving social media into our existing business functions to help build a more collaborative infrastructure.

Social Business Driving Engagement

While often hard to measure, social business has productivity impacts that can be felt by IT, Sales, HR and many other areas in the organization -- see Infographic (reg required) -- but the real impact, and where the ROI can be best shown, is the increased engagement your internal and external audiences have with the communications initiatives that you invest in.

The key to measuring this increased engagement is ensuring you have the right tools and strategies in place to help monitor, react and respond to these initiatives in real time.

By analyzing real-time visitor and social interaction information (both inside and outside the firewall), organizations can help to optimize online initiatives and identify actionable trends within their visitor base, and capture user events that are specific to business goals.

The Impact of Social Analytics

The power in using Social Analytics is enabling the business to use the data to make recommendations to the business about how things are working, or not, and how they can be improved upon, both for your users and your customers.

Social analytics, from an external view, provides a window into things like how people perceive your brand and how they are responding to your corporate products, services, and marketing messages.

Internally, social analytics provides a window into things like; what is the most engaging content on my intranet; how many people are commenting on our blogs; what is the tone of those comments and who are the most influential people in my community.

Social Analytics can become the vehicle that helps your business translate data into insights. It can help improve your customer experience by writing better targeted content, can provide sentiment analysis, create higher converting sites and reshape a user’s site navigation to improve the overall online experience -- just to name a few!

For a concise summary of cross-department benefits, download the Infographic here.