Thanks for the comment. Radian6 was featured in Phil Sheldrake’s ebook. They not only crawl for sentiment and conversation but purchase and combine that with third-party data such as Nielsen.

Alas, you mention the elusive ROI challenge. Can be tough in some situations to quantify, much like many BI programs. Socialytics provides pieces to the larger puzzle and can have an indirect impact to ROI.

Sentiment is just one gain from “crawling the conversation” and it’s probably the easiest. But what about using what your customers are saying to better understand their likes/dislikes, patterns, preferences for other related products, hobbies, concerns, etc. Much richer intelligence but very much more difficut to do.

I’m sure the brainiacs out there are already at work on this and we’ll see solutions soon.

Terri

I would think that BI tools could tackle this challenge but, as I watched this demo, I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Where’s the ROI on this?”

It helps when you understand what people are saying about you and your products, to be sure. But how much? If sentiment analysis confirms that people are more positive about your products, then how does that translate into bottom line results? We’re not running for election, right? We’re ultimately not aiming for 60% approval, right? I’m curious about how socialytics or any tools can answer bottom line questions.

Seems like the answers to these questions are still pending but, given the relative age of social media, this really doesn’t surprise me.