Attensity Group recently announced the availability of their Social Media Monitoring solution called Attensity360, targeting the European market. The product is being offered as a stand-alone solution to monitor social media outlets and provide analytics to identify context specific conversations based on sites like Facebook and Twitter. The ability to gather insights from social network sites and develop sentiment analysis and better plan and market products and services seems to be one of the benefits. Businesses are slowly learning to take what is happening online and transform what is being said within social media outlets into marketing campaigns. Sites such as Facebook are being used by companies to identify buyer preferences, social connections, and the like. They do this to develop products that can be targeted more specifically to desired customers.
The concept of online privacy and the ability to communicate within private communities is limited by the fact that online social communities collect information about members, whether or not they share that information more broadly. Consequently, companies will use profiles to identify types of customers they are interested in targeting or offer free products to people based on profile preferences or online conversations. Granted, this is great for marketing campaigns and trying out new strategies, but becomes a little bit over done when looking at the expectation of privacy that people no longer have.
Social media analytics gives companies the ability to gain a broader view of an organization’s market and potential customers. Because marketing activities are so hard to measure, this new way to evaluate product “buzz” and develop collaborations between social media and marketing activities can help companies develop more formalized structures to measure the success of their marketing campaigns and develop a more targeted approach to marketing by developing a more personalized approach to marketing in general.
On the other side of things, people who may want to remain anonymous may be slowly losing that option. Obviously this involves discretion from the side of social networkers themselves, but the fact is that more and more companies are using solutions and applying analytics similar to Attunity360 to identify data collaborations between online conversations and associated information about the people participating in those conversations. As these solutions become more popular, the way businesses develop and manage their marketing activities will change to directly target consumers based on their online profiles and information available.
