Friday Funny - Analytics at their best

Social networking by the numbers

Jesse Thomas does an excellent job of rolling the numbers of social media in to a fast paced video. Its crazy how fast these numbers keep growing!

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Top Trends in Business Intelligence

One of the great things about the TDWI World Conference series is that you get to see your friends every 90 days and for the last year or two Vickie Farrell, Strategic Marketing Manager for HP’s BI Solutions business and I have had a chance to visit and discuss the trends in BI. Vickie and her team do an excellent job surveying business intelligence end users to compile the annual whitepaper titled HP’s Top 10 Trends in Business Intelligence a comprehensive look at the industry.

I'll list a couple here but you should follow the link to get the full document.

Trend #10: Growing interest in cloud computing for business intelligence.
Trend #9: Social computing and the next frontier for business intelligence.
Trend #8: Growing importance of integrating and analyzing unstructured/semi-structured data.
Trend #7: Growing impact and opportunity of Complex Event Processing.
Trend #6: Data warehousing and business intelligence: A new generation drives new priorities.

To get the rest follow the link!

Who are the top social influencer's in your space?

Thats not an easy question. There are a lot of interesting solutions out in the market that do a good job counting things like number of posts or number of twitter followers but do these simple metrics actually tell us who is the top influencer on a topic within a market? I don't think they tell the whole story.

I recently tackled this challenge using some existing technology coupled with external data to create the Topic Influencer Report you see below. It takes into account not just the easy to count items but additional information to analyze the facts and metrics that include calculating a proprietary Engagement Power Ranking along with an proprietary Authority Ranking. Often times we make assumptions about how important one author may be to our brand based on volume but in the end making noise doesn't matter if the community doesn't respect or see the author as authoritative. And its especially interesting when you take into account weather they have a loyal and engaged audience. Adding Authority, Engagement Power Ranking and the other data points create a clear picture of the best conversations to follow and participate in.

The Influencer Report below is based on 2 large, publicly held business intelligence and data warehousing companies, their brands and their products. These firms are direct competitors. We monitored over a 6 month period during which 7,200 references and comments were made on 675 website, 105+ twitter accounts, 100 blogspot domains, 400+ Facebook posts and another 5000 various web based social references. 

In this example we identified 40 powerful voices for this community and for demonstration purposes have plotted the top influencer's here. (don't panic if you don't see your name, this report is topic based on two brands so if you don't write about these two companies much or their technology you won't make this list)

 

We produce three separate views of the report to help our clients each is based on the same methodology.

1. Topic Influencer Report - Example above

2. Competitive Influencer Report - Identify who leads the communities that take about your competition

3. Sentiment Influencer Report - Identify your brand Mavins as well as the authors who are broadcasting negative content so you can engage and educate

Give me a call if your interested in seeing who the true top influencer's on your brand, topic or technology are.

Analyzing the voice of the customer (VOC)

First off this isn't an easy task, the amount of unstructured data available in client driven communities is huge not to mention the standard enterprise data we already have that needs to be integrated with this highly valuable source of insight. Attensity Group's suite of applications focus on leveraging actionable data from emails, web forums, surveys, CRM systems, online communities and other sources. Attensity just launched Analyze for VoC Community Advantage. Attensity's VoC solutions convert the text of conversations and feedback into intelligence with dash boarding capabilities that reveal sentiments and trends of your customer or prospect communities.

The Analyze for VOC Community Advantage product is a SaaS hosted solution offering quick setup and fixed monthly costs for the service. Providing insight into customer sentiment, loyalty and satisfaction. The combination of a semantic engine and text analytics allow Attensity to find valuable data where others just see unstructured chatter. Companies in this sector are getting the attention of the front end business intelligence companies as many of them see the addition of this type of market intelligence as critical to their business intelligence offering.

The addition of this type of data to enterprise intelligence can be invaluable and allow companies the insight needed to become less reactive and more right-time in their approach to trends within client communities.

I don't see this type of analysis being adopted by every company that gets value from their BI infrastructure.....just the smart ones.