SAS Launches Social Media Analytics for Enterprise Customers
Tue, Apr 13, 2010
Yesterday, SAS, the leader in business analytics, launched an enterprise social media analytics tool. This is a sign the large companies are ready for social media. The very fact that SAS has deemed social media important enough to dedicate resources to building, launching and supporting this new program is one more thing you can hold up as an example of the corporate acceptance of listening and responding to your customers online.
This new product, which is offered as a hosted solution, features a robust analytics engine that can properly code online sentiment at the same level as human analysts, with greater than 90% accuracy, according to online measurement expert, Katie Payne. SAS is used to crunching large amounts of data and social media easily provides large amounts of data. One of the differentiators of the SAS Social Media Analytics product involves the initial software setup. While most social media tools may go back a few months at the most, the new SAS tool captures data that goes back for up to seven years on the various sites related to your industry. Even though there may not be much relevancy beyond the last two years, the capability is there for more.
All analytics products help you answer business questions and determine how you are meeting your business goals. The custom set up of the program involves creating appropriate keywords, finding the right sites and influencers to gather the data important to your company. After you review this first set of data, this becomes the baseline, but not in the traditional way. As you continue to use the software, you have the ability to refine the rules for capturing data and filtering out the noise. While all the original data remains intact for trending purposes, you can re-process it against the more refined filters and re-analyze it. You might discover trends that you originally missed.
The program allows you to forecast both social media sentiment and resources needed to respond, based on past data. You can also measure the effectiveness of professional media, as compared to consumer-generated media, import customer emails to look for customer support trends that are mirrored on the web, and find industry influencers to reach out to. And all this data, along with corresponding individuals, customers and prospects can be shared with your CRM system for fully integrated tracking and management.
SAS SVP and CMO Jim Davis
Here are links to the official SAS information:
Other coverage included:
After watching the demo and reading some of the links below, does this change the landscape of social media analytics and push other social media analytics programs to up their game, or is SAS playing in a different market?
Jeffrey L. Cohen is the Managing Editor of SocialMediaB2B.com. Follow Jeff on Twitter at @jeffreylcohen.
Tags: #SASSMA, analytics, Monitoring, SAS, sentiment
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I think it is great that SAS has entered this space, as you say “This is a sign the large companies are ready for social media.” But it is a sign amongst many others, it is not a watershed moment. So in answer to your question, “…does this change the landscape…” I’d have to say no – there are 150+ companies offering social media analytics and an increasing number in the social media CRM space as well.
The specific capabilities offered by SAS are already available from other vendors such as Attensity and Autonomy (amongst others). Katie Payne, who is terrific, told me that she has not compared SAS to any of the other sentiment analysis technologies, which seems to be one of the critical features where SAS would like to claim an advantage.
What is true — the industry is maturing. More enterprise software vendors will enter this space. This is good for businesses trying to understand what to do in this area and for us as practitioners trying to advise them.
But along with maturity comes responsibility — let’s start demanding that claims like 90% accuracy in sentiment analysis are backed by industry accepted tests that all participants can run against their systems. Otherwise articles like this one are just PR spin.
Ted
Thanks for the comments. Yes, it is one sign among others that the monitoring business is maturing. While SAS can promote their background in analytics, they do need to substantiate their claims to truly differentiate the product.