Tuesday 19 October 2010

Defining social media analysis


So many new terms so few definitions!

This post from Forrester Research answered some key questions:

Question 1: Social media analytics and social network analysis: Are these simply two ways of referring to the same applications, or is there some important difference between them?

Answer:

Social media analytics refers to BI tools—reporting, dashboarding, visualization, search, event-driven alerting, text mining, etc.--applied to information sourced from social media such as Twitter and Facebook.

Social network analysis is advanced analytics that is specifically focused on identifying and forecasting connections, relationships, and influence among individuals and groups; it mines transactions, interactions, and other behavioral information that may be sourced from social media, and/or just as often from CRM, billing, and other internal systems.

Social media monitoring is real-time analytics that uses complex event processing (CEP) to acquire, filter, and display events taking place in social media.

Social intelligence refers to the trend toward incorporation of social network style interaction models—such as those associated with Facebook and wikis—into the BI user experience.

Question 2: What are the key applications for CRM? What’s the business benefit? Who’s doing this? What business processes do they support? Is anybody doing both social media analytics AND social network analysis?

Answer: 

The key application of social media analytics for CRM is listening to and engaging with customers, and prospects, who voice their requirements, sentiments, and issues through social media; product, brand, marketing, and customer service professionals are doing this.

The key application of social network analysis is looking for shifting patterns of influence among customers who drive churn, upsell, and cross-sell throughout communities; this is being used by the same groups that use social media analytics, and is also being used by security professionals to detect and prevent fraudulent collusive activities.

The key application of social media monitoring is identifying, and hopefully predicting, customer issues that surface through social media before they become showstoppers; once again, this is used by all of these groups, plus also being leveraged by public safety and law enforcement to detect signs of criminal and terrorist activity.

The key application of social intelligence is to help BI users tap the actionable intelligence that is in one another’s heads; this is not yet being implemented widely among BI users, due to a paucity of commercial tools.

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