This is a difficult post to write and not appear too salesly or preachy but I’m hoping that the following information might guide organizations towards a text analytics approach that meets their needs.
When you begin to think about creating a social media strategy and selecting a technology, one of the first consideration should be what do you intend to do with the data. There’s a lot of valuable information that can be surfaced about your social customer so tying your analysis to specific business metrics and actions can help focus your analysis.
Ultimately the technology your organization chooses influences not only the accuracy of your analysis but how effective the business decisions are that have been informed by that data. If mentions and RTs are important metrics then a less complicated technology may be exactly what your organization needs. But it your business requires acting up on those insights, mapping social profiles to existing offline data then you need a sophisticated analytics tool. The more data you are able to process in real-time, the more accurate and actionable the insights the more value your business can derive from integrating social intelligence into the business.
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Evolving Towards an Enterprise Business
I think the definition and transition to an enterprise (or social) business is unique for each industry, even for each company. The critical metrics, audience segmentation and engagement strategy reflect the culture of individual organizations. However, a standard for isolating, monitoring and integrating social or enterprise analytics is the linchpin for repeatable and operational success. An organization will struggle to drive and measure ROI and influence business outcomes if they switch between metrics or if their text analytics tool is not robust enough to surface social business intelligence.
So, when thinking of your text analytics requirements, consider what type of actions your organization plans to take with the data. We’ve organized levels of active engagement into three categories:
Brand Tracker
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Brand Intelligence
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Brand Action
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recognizing that these are not three discrete segments (a number of companies will combine elements from each into an approach) but should provide a general guide of how to begin thinking of strategies to derive more value from your analytics effort. Thinking about the end result of your analysis, whether that’s increased sales, improved customer satisfaction or collaborative product development, will influence the focus of your research and the technology requirements of your application.
