Enterprise Social Media Analytics

The Social Media Analytics group on LinkedIn received a set of questions from Kevin Dean of Manobyte this morning. He was sparking a conversation about the "Integration of Social Media into the Enterprise." His verbatim post was, "in order for organization to successfully leverage Social Media Data they need to integrate it into their BI Systems and CRM applications. How should this be done? What are the challenges? What are the actionable metrics/events?"

Assuming two possible paths (many more exist), here are a couple scenarios.

Path 1) you're an enterprise that is operating a social network for some reason--maybe a user-group. In this case measuring community growth--number of community members--is an obvious indicator of some success. Additionally tracking conversion from group membership to purchases of additional products / services would be a strong indicator of success. In these scenarios a CRM integration would make good sense; and a method for identifying unique individual customers would be necessary.

For the above scenario many of the community providers have APIs that would allow easy data portability. I'd recommend someone like Leverage Software.

Path 2) you're monitoring customer feedback that may be received directly by the enterprise, but also monitoring comments made in various UGC online. In this case metrics around number of posts/comments would be straight-forward to track on a key-word or topic basis. How many times did my product get mentioned in what places and with what general sentiment?

In this second case a monitoring services like Radian6 or filtrbox or Collective Intellect, or + + + would provide you with these metrics, which would be valuable to various brand or business managers.

And the last point I'd suggest, which is becoming an ever-more important and prevalent benchmark, is the area of comment analytics. This means listening to the community that matters to your business and analyzing what they're saying and why. Building a stronger link to consumers and customers in various online social communities requires a subtle and specific understanding of what they're actually talking about in UGC. And the trending of dialogue topics, and measurement of change over time, is essential to improving on either of the scenarios outlined above. The mechanics of this are similar to scenario 1 above; Leximancer (my business) supports a Web Service API.