In my presentation at Monitoring Social Media Bootcamp 2010 last month (embedded below for your convenience) I dedicated a slide to something I referred to as the "Awesome Analytics Advantage", making those organisations achieving this advantage "Triple A"!
Fundamentally, this advantage is manifest via the intelligent connection of traditionally siloed analytical services and databases....
retail analytics + web analytics + social web analytics + CRM + sRM + business intelligence + Internet of Things data analytics = Awesome Analytical Advantage!
Well, I've just enjoyed a 50 minute webcast by SAS, featuring the queen of measurement herself, Katie Delahaye Paine, during which SAS presented their new social media analytics service and answered questions from the floor and via Twitter (hashtag #sassma). My conclusion...
SAS has leapfrogged to the front of the Triple A pack. Now I should caveat this conclusion with the simple fact that I have yet to get my mits on the service, but given SAS' heritage products and services and the brief demonstration during the webcast of their SMA's integration with Web analytics, it looks to me like the social Web analytics field changed today.
Now it's not all good news (but then you wouldn't expect a new entrant to achieve nirvana at their first attempt). We learn for instance that "Reuters Business" has influence of 122,530. Yes indeed. Not 122,000 mind, or 123,000, but 122,530. But 122,530 what??
Is it guilty of my definition of "what influence is not" in my presentation? Specifically slides 3 and 4, the latter reading...
Influence is not some quantity invented by a PR firm, analytics provider, or measurement and evaluation company that rolls up a number of indices and measures into some relatively arbitrary compound formula that makes any appreciation of the underlying approach, variables and mathematics completely opaque to the end-user thereby radically attenuating any little use it may have been but in such a way that it can be branded nicely and sold as “unique”.
But there was some talk of clients being able to customise the "influence score" to their needs, so whilst I still believe in influence-centric PR campaigns over influencer-centric approaches, I won't pigeonhole SAS alongside the culprits identifed in my presentation just yet.
And lastly, for those semantic and pedantic amongst you (long may we thrive), here's why I continue to refer to social Web analytics rather than simply social media analytics.
I'll leave you with my presentation. I'm delighted it became SlideShare's most tweeted document and most discussed on Facebook for the couple of days after it went up...
