The challenge for social media analytics is in going deeper not just broader.
Business 2 Community did a short interview with me yesterday asking a few questions about social media and text analytics. It’s up on their site now in case you’re interested.
I think social media analytics has a lot of growing up to do. Now that both text analytics pure plays as well as market research firms including Anderson Analytics (OdinText.com) are starting to take a greater interest in social media monitoring than before. This greater interest from players with stronger analytics experience is evidenced in part by such events as the new Social Media Analytics Summit (organized by Text Analytics News), as well as the greater incorporation of social media in many other types of research such as customer satisfaction surveys. I think the thinning of the herd I predicted last month is definitely nigh.
We’re already starting to see survey respondents being allowed to share their positive text comments on their favorite social networks directly from within the Net Promoter (NPS) surveys. Conversely feedback from sites like TripAdvisor are being fed into the survey data for analysis by corporate analysts looking at their customer satisfaction data. For better or worse it seems traditional marketing research is becoming a 2-way public dialogue with out customers.
However I believe the challenge and skill, as I mentioned in the interview with B2C, does not lie in the amount of data you can incorporate, but rather in narrowing the data and deepening of the analysis. Something that we software and research firms will need educated clients to request, else only more and more data will be added with only cursory insights.
