Social Analytics: Another Front For Business Intelligence

While my core coverage is social computing (e.g., social media, social networking) - related domains that take up an increasing number of my research and client interaction cycles are: identity, analytics, and mobility. So I found this news release by Socialcast today interesting on many fronts - and yet I'm also left looking for more from the market in general when it comes to social analytics.

On the one hand - the need for comprehensive analytics when it comes to social activities is very real. Social messaging (micro-blogging) and activity streams are rich sources of information on social structure and relations. While I'm not a big fan of the "tacit knowledge" argument (it tends to me over-simplified and oversold - especially attempts to measure it) - the aggregation and correlation of interaction patterns is nevertheless very insightful. Often within large enterprises, the ability to make latent connections visible is helpful. Assessing interaction and conversation patterns (as well as the anti-patterns in regards to lurkers, peripheral participants) can be very insightful. The data can also become an important import to broader social network analysis tools. So overall, I very much like this move by Socialcast - it ups the baseline expectations by customers of vendors in this space. I would expect other players to consider similar moves - although they may partner with vendors like SAP who provide social analytics.

On the other hand - what Socialcast delivers is only one piece of a broader framework - people's interactions will span social messaging tools - conversations splinter and become fragmented across other communication tools and collaborative workspaces. So while this is a solid first move by Socialcast - the question will be whether the analytical framework becomes more broad. Analytics may be the key to the long-term success of the company as well - social messaging is something that will become a feature within larger platforms from IBM and Microsoft.

Finally - I do like the term "social business intelligence" - but for it to become widely adopted - other vendors need to leverage the concept - I could see someone like Attensity Group, Attensa's StreamServer (the company seems to be recasting itself), SAP, etc leveraging the idea for instance.

Socialcast Introduces Social Business Intelligence®: The First Suite of Real-Time Enterprise Microblogging Analytics

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Socialcast, a leading provider of Enterprise microblogging software, today announced a complete refresh of its platform to coincide with the launch of Social Business Intelligence®, a proprietary suite of analytics that provides measurable insight into the microblogging activity occurring inside a company’s Socialcast network. With the goal of measuring the value of tacit knowledge management and informal social activity, Social Business Intelligence® provides real-time feedback and actionable insights into the employees, topics and conversations that users are finding important and that spur active participation. The interface update streamlines the product’s capabilities, making usage more intuitive and measurement of activity straightforward.

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HIGHLIGHTS AND FEATURES

• Organizational Network Analysis tools to identify the informal connections between individuals and groups
• Posting, commenting, and “liking” activity over time, offering insight into conversation initiation and response behaviors
• Lurking and listening activity analysis, surfacing the invisible facets of network adoption
• Interactivity patterns between users, showing proactive and reactive relationships with others in their social graph
• Moments of transition from passive to active usage, allowing companies to find people and topics that ignite conversation
• Interactive visualization of all community discussions, surfacing the most active messages based on user interaction, popular posting times and dates
• Highlights the most popular messages and topics, allowing administrators to quickly visit important conversations as identified by the workforce

Socialcast Introduces Social Business Intelligence®: The First Suite of Real-Time Enterprise Microblogging Analytics

Comments

[business intelligence]

Social Analytics may be the key to the long-term success of the companies like IBM and Microsoft.

[business intelligence]

Social Analytic are very helpful to the business. These strategy is right now used by the Intel. It gives the business growth as you said in these post. Yes It is correct. Every man or people are on the Social Media. These strategy can give you more business popularity over the web world. Thanks for sharing a wonderful information.