Saturday, April 16, 2011

Social Analytics - Gaps & Top Applications

Every organization and corporate house is participating in the Social Media; its come to a point where PR’s focus now are into Social Media. Social media opens a direct channel with the customers with their respective direct identities and hence more ownership and interactions; suddenly a new transaction medium and channel with direct commercial implications. Value spewed by Social media channels now has made the most stiff-necked CEO’s bend down and deploy Social media strategists, this channel has truly emerged and maturing quite fast.

With the Social media becoming a business accelerator and Gartner identifying that Social Communications and Collaboration & Social Analytics as the Top 10 strategic technologies for 2011; the game in this space is heated and the market is lapping up every possible skill to make the most of this new front. With all the transactions and the buzz around the social web that is happening there is an immediate need to monitor, record, analyze, model, gather intel over these transactions. The market now has hundreds of Social Media analysis companies rendering services and providing products, of these products there are a host of features on offing, only few however provide solutions addressing the need.

At the first look every product looks similar and there is not much difference; when drilled down over product usage, product adoption, flexibility, rule sets, parameters, people & pages analysis, integrations, key social web performance indicators; there are only a few that surface to meet the demands. With not in any particular order the following are the ‘surfaced’ and recommended products. The hype over this market segment might fizz out and we will have audiences investing into products and solutions and discover that not all was good that meets the eye.

So what are the products that have some credibility, good rate of adoption, good support, mapped to best practices? At the outset I had dwelved deep trying to understand the feature sets vis a vis solutions that can be created and how good they address the emerging market needs.

Top Social Media Analytics Products:

Sysomos Heartbeat 2.0
Sysomos MAP
Edge3
Kontagent
Radian6 Dashboard
Radian6 Engagement Console
Alterian SM2
Attentio
DNA13
Fangle
Research.ly
Beevolve
Social Mention
CollectiveIntellect
ScoutLab
BrandsEye



Most Wanted Social Media Feature Lists:
Timeline Analysis
Funnel Analysis
Viral Optimizer & Analysis
Revenue Tracking
Traffic Source Optimizer & Analysis
Retention Workflows
Competitive Analysis
Geographic and Demographic Data
Key Influencer Identification
Key User / App / Page Engagement
Comprehensive and Spam-Free Database
Real-time feeds & captures of blogs, message boards and other types of unstructured data
Real-time analysis of blogs, message boards and other types of unstructured data
Comprehensive and constant web coverage
Social Media Metrics
Data Filtering and Segmentation
Workflow Management
Social CRM and Web Analytics Integration
Automated Sentiment Analysis
Historical Data
Listening Grid
Real-Time Coordination
Case Based Reporting
Complete Activity & Conversation History
Social Profiles
Integration and Interops Capability
Efficiency and Productivity
 

Jesu Valiant