Analytics in the Social Media Space

Will Analytics be an integral part of the social media space? According to the IT budgets of Fortune 500 companies, the analysis of customer online social interactions is taking center stage. Forrester reports: “Despite recession, more than 50 percent of marketers increase spending on social media”1.

Organizations have begun to realize that understanding potential customer’s online behavior is critical to staying one step ahead of the competition. Some online vendors have utilized this information to create personalized web content to better target potential customer groups. Collecting and analyzing online behavior and translating this information into reliable and actionable knowledge to support decision making is quite a challenge.



There are many tools on the market to support analytics for social media. Feature rich tools like Lyzasoft support searches; bookmarks; mixing, matching, and combining; tagging; sharing; commenting; and rating - with BI analytics. Open source tools like Google analytics which are not typically used for Social Media sites can be customized with an extension of Social Media Metrics for Web 2.0 social sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us and more. Industry leaders like IBM offer text analytics; SAS offers Social Media analytics, while niche vendors like Lexalytics offer Sentiment Analytics. These software products help organizations in converting online behavior and opinions into virtual currency by analyzing the deep rooted semantics and the context of every single word.

With so many products available in this space how does an Organization choose the right vendor to support their endeavors? Forrester lists of a few top attributes to look for in a Social Media BI vendor 2:

• Reliable data collection
• Easy-to-use Interface
• Product pricing
• Match between product capabilities and requirements
• Quality of support
• Data reporting assurance
• Integration with other BI applications

Forrester also suggests these important data capabilities in the solution:

• Custom metrics
• Easy implementation / deployment
• Benchmarking
• Data warehouse
• Ability to export data to other applications
• Collection of full (no sampling) data
• Administrative access controls
• Ability to import data for blended analysis

It is safe to say that this area is swiftly moving to the top of the hype cycle. The next Web Analytics maturity wave intertwined with Web 2.0 will touch upon every single aspect of our lives from political campaigns to everyday dining. Just imagine, you are vacationing in an exotic island and your cell phone alerts you when you are within 5 miles of a restaurant your friend mentioned during a casual Facebook chat.


References:

1 - Despite Recession, More Than 50pct of Marketers Increase Spending on Social Media, Forrester Consulting, http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/03/despite-recession-more-than-50-of-marketers-increase-spending-on-social-media.php

2 - Appraising Investments in Web Analytics - A Commissioned Study Conducted by Forrester Consulting on Behalf of Google, Forrester Consulting, September 2009