Adoption of social analytics beyond the obvious – Are we there yet? No!

Customer conversations at Clarabridge C3 conference last month made it painfully obvious: Businesses are hungry for analytics yet often struggle to see the application of text analytics beyond analyzing survey and customer experience data. While that’s not bad, there is so much more that can be done to harness the power of data analytics for example to track brand reputation in real-time.

Dell Social Media AnalyticsSimply put: Text Analytics is Text Analytics is Text analytics! It’s not a technology leap, it’s the application of the technology to new sets of data like social media and new sets of questions/queries, that business might not have considered before. This data packs the potential to derive insights that enable businesses to remain competitive à the crux is in the query.

In my conversations with fellow attendees, I found that many are already advanced in their analytics maturity since they are using a text analytics platform and now crave to expand their use cases to derive insights for their business, for example they want to:

  • Understand and proactively engage on what is being said about their brand, industry, competitors, products, etc.
  • Improve customer relationships via social media

In many cases they have the tools and might only require a change in mindset to realize the full potential of social media analytics. It’s incumbent upon todays CIO to educate the business stakeholders to expand the company’s analytic capabilities to include social media analytics as an essential ingredient in their business growth strategy.

But before that’s possible let’s take a look at the journey. Whenever we talk to businesses about their social media analytics strategy we talk about a journey that begins by listening to customers, then collecting and recording the data, analyzing it, applying heuristics and business algorithms to the data to derive actionable insights from it. Essentially this means going from an ad-hoc approach to a highly optimized analytics solution. These capabilities do not get built overnight but in increments as the business develops analytics maturity. One important point to note here is that businesses not only have to make the right technology investments but also have to invest in training personnel and creating a social media analytics culture within the organization.

Dell - Social Media analytics journey

Thinking back about my conversations at the conference it was obvious that many businesses are ready to harness the power of social analytics beyond the text analytics investments have and ask questions they never dreamed of before.

About the Author: Shree Dandekar