Social Media Analytics: You Will Still Need Actual Analysts in the Loop

Social media analytics is one of the most exciting new frontiers in business intelligence (BI). As I noted in a recent blog post, it refers to the application of BI tools, such as reporting, dashboarding, visualization, search, event-driven alerting, and text mining, to information that originates as messages streaming from social media such as Twitter and Facebook.

Forrester sees growing adoption of social media analytics across the entire customer relationship management (CRM) lifecycle. This makes perfect sense, because social media are where customers spend more and more time, voice more unvarnished sentiment, and interact with a growing range of trusted commercial enterprises in addition to their friends and families.

Recognizing this trend, enterprise CRM professionals everywhere have incorporated social media into their public relations, product management, marketing, sales, and customer service processes. In addition to establishing their brands’ presence in the leading social media communities, companies have implemented tools to support continuous listening and engagement with customers, prospects, and the world at large through these channels.

Listening and engaging via social media involves much more than BI dashboards to monitor mentions on Twitter and the like. It may also require tight integration with the company’s CRM, enterprise data warehouse (EDW), business process management (BPM), business rules engine (BRE), complex event processing (CEP), predictive analytics and data mining (PA/DM), text analytics (TA), social network analysis (SNA), and other key tools and platforms. We often refer to this cluster of technologies as enablers for “social CRM.”

Jim also blogs at http://blogs.forrester.com/business_process.