The New Business Intelligence of Social Media

As one who runs a social media agency, I'm often addressing questions around the topic of social media research, monitoring, and analytics. The questions vary, but are typically consistent in nature:

1. How is research valuable to social media?

2. What do all these tracking tools provide to guide strategy and tactics?

3. What should we really be doing with social media?

Answers to these questions may be unique to any given effort, but a common best practice for entering and maintaining a wide range of social media initiatives begins with business intelligence (BI), a term first coined over 50 years ago to describe computer-based approaches for analyzing data to support decision making.

The Tools and Top 5 Measurable Attributes

Having worked with lead offerings developed by companies that include Crimson Hexagon, Buzz Metrics, Collective Intellect, Radian6, Sysomos, Filtrbox, and Umbria, here's a quick summary of function and value:

1. Volume of Conversation and Share of Voice: Find and track a significant amount of content within online "conversations" that matter to you most. For benchmarking purposes, conversations are often segmented by subject matter (competitive/industry brands, products, services) and source (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, etc).

2. Identification of Key Themes, Opinions and Trending Topics: The tag cloud is a basic representation of this. If the volume of data warrants, filtering conversations by theme and topic is a way to obtain deeper meaning and value.

3. Sentiment Analysis: The main function is indexing the tone of conversations (positive, negative or neutral), with more sophisticated insights gained through content matched to varying degrees of sentiment (satisfied vs. very satisfied).

4. Influencer Identification: This is about growing a database of relevant individuals, organizations, and web properties with a history or potential of influencing conversations about your subject matter. Beyond traditional influencer identification, companies like Linkfluence focus on identifying how content spreads through and across communities (lifestyle, gossip, political, etc.).

5. Social Graphing and Viral Tracking: Tools from companies like Rapleaf give insights into where your customers (and potential customers) frequent online by linking e-mail addresses to user accounts within social networking properties (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, etc.).

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