Social Media Analytics vs. Social Network Analysis

  Is there a real difference between these two terms, or are you seeing double? As an industry analyst, I'm part of the professional class that delights in defining standard marketplace terminology. More than that, many of us spend our working lives coaxing industry to march under marketing banners aligned with our pet definitions.

  Yes, indeed, each analyst likes to feel that his or her marketecture terminology should rule school. Last month I did a Forrester podcast on a topic that's extremely hot right now: leveraging the power of social media and social networks to manage your brand, drive marketing and sales campaigns, and manage ongoing customer relationships. In that session, I discussed the role of analytics in social media for multichannel customer relationship management (CRM).

  My initial impetus for the podcast was to spell out the chief distinctions between two terms that, on first glance, appear almost synonymous. During the podcast I also trucked in another related closely related term -- social media monitoring -- and even alluded to social intelligence and other phrases that have gained currency.

  What follows, for those of you who don't listen to podcasts, or can't find them, is the gist of what I said:

  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: In the broadest sense:

• 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 3: How comprehensive and mature are commercial solutions for social media analytics and social network analysis? Is there any published Forrester research evaluating these offerings?

Answer: Maturity varies by segment. Social media analytics and monitoring are well-established market segment that Forrester's Marketing and Strategy client group covers under the heading of "listening platforms." Social network analysis, a reasonably well established disciplined that is seeing a ramp in new commercial offerings, is covered by myself, and was discussed in my recent Forrester Wave for Predictive Analytics and Data Mining solutions, my Q2 teleconference, various recent blogposts, and at IT Forum. Social intelligence, still largely a futures topic, was discussed by the Forrester "virtual data management" analyst team in Rob Karel's blogpost from May.

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