In this Recent Article, Collective Intellect CEO Don Springer talks about social media and text analytics. Mr. Springer provides some industry research:
- 127 million people, or 57.5% of Internet users, visited a social networking site at least once a month in 2010. Not only is the number of users growing quickly, but also the audience demographics continue to widen.
- The growth of unstructured data is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 62% through 2012.
Mr. Springer introduces a social media maturity curve that I found quite effective. The curve helps companies identify where they are in the adoption of social media analytics and a guide for becoming a social business. The curve moves up through five levels:
- Social monitoring
- Social presence
- Social research
- Social CRM and targeting
- Social BPM and engagement
The higher up the curve a company goes, the more value created for the company. This is consistent with the notion that businesses will weave social into their business processes. As companies evolve up the curve, their use of analytics will become more strategic and social data is combined with other data sources to deliver more insight and enable better outcomes.
A key point made, that I see as well, is that companies are no longer just performing basic listening. True value comes from deeper analytics that deliver actionable intelligence and initiate process. In addition, companies are viewing analytics more holistically. For more detail, I recommend this read.
Reimagining the Future 