SAS Seeks to Improve Data Mining of Social Media

No one doubts that social media - all the stuff on Facebook, Twitter and other online forums - provides a rich lode of user sentiment that companies ought to be able to exploit. And not just to sharpen their marketing, but also to improve their products and services - potentially, the ultimate source of customer views and a crowd-sourced suggestion box.

But the challenge is how to make sense of the ocean of information, find meaningful patterns and use it as guide for action. The digital tools for social media monitoring and analysis, analysts say, are still primitive. The current ones focus mainly on so-called sentiment analysis, giving companies a broad-brush approval rating at best.

SAS Institute, the leader in advanced business intelligence and data analytics software, thinks it can do better. It is introducing a software service on Monday called SAS Social Media Analytics that analysts say seems to represent a step ahead in social media analysis tools.

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Analysts who have looked at the new offering - and tried it out - are impressed by the accuracy of its automated sentiment analysis. Until now, they say, software alone has not come near the caliber of "human readers" (a person reading through thousands of tweets related to a given company and rating each as positive or negative).

Mark Chaves, director of marketing intelligence at SAS, said the service will also allow companies to move beyond sentiment analysis of social media. For example, he said the tool will allow companies to attach "influence scores" to identify the people, blogs and Web sites that are most important to their company or industry.

Read more.

See also
SAS Offers Social Media Analytics Service, Information Week, Apr 13, 2010.