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Social Media Analytics: You Will Still Need Actual Analysts In The Loop
Forrester Blogs, James Kobielus, July 16, 2010
Social media analytics is one of the most exciting new frontiers in business intelligence (BI). As I noted in a recent blog post, it refers to the application of BI tools, such as reporting, dashboarding, visualization, search, event-driven alerting, and text mining, to information that originates as messages streaming from social media such as Twitter and Facebook.
Forrester sees growing adoption of social media analytics across the entire customer relationship management (CRM) life cycle. This makes perfect sense, because social media are where customers spend more and more time, voice more unvarnished sentiment, and interact with a growing range of trusted commercial enterprises in addition to their friends and families.
Recognizing this trend, enterprise CRM professionals everywhere have incorporated social media into their public relations, product management, marketing, sales, and customer service processes. In addition to establishing their brands' presence in the leading social media communities, companies have implemented tools to support continuous listening and engagement with customers, prospects, and the world at large through these channels.
Listening and engaging via social media involves much more than BI dashboards to monitor mentions on Twitter and the like. It may also require tight integration with the company's CRM, enterprise data warehouse (EDW), business process management (BPM), business rules engine (BRE), complex event processing (CEP), predictive analytics and data mining (PA/DM), text analytics (TA), social network analysis (SNA), and other key tools and platforms. We often refer to this cluster of technologies as enablers for "social CRM."
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Though many of these functions can be automated to a considerable degree, a social CRM platform must also deliver sophisticated analytics to those human beings - especially your customer service agents - who are the critical links in the customer-engagement cycle. Even if content analytics technology were perfected and all issues that surface through social media could be identified unambiguously, there is still no substitute for humans - let's call them social CRM analysts - to evaluate the full CRM context, meaning, stakes, and response priorities.
Read more.