7 intelligent social analytics tools for the new age

The value of social media analytics was long before proven. But the extent to which it is influencing real-time business decisions has made all predictions look miniscule. Today, social insights has become one of the primary inputs into marketing and product strategy formulation.

Dashboards by Radian6, Brandwatch and Sysomos have been ruling the monitoring space, but social analytics has evolved beyond monitoring in the last few years. From consumer insights to breaking news alerts, a bunch of companies have created their unique niches, and are providing unparalleled intelligence to their clients. Here is a list of seven of those and what makes them unique.

Alerts on News, Markets & Public Sector: Dataminr

Dataminr specializes in providing real-time actionable alerts as soon as something important happens in the news, finance or public policy space. Identifying patterns in numerous data sets, and collaborating the insights with market information, Dataminr decides which information is credible and potentially actionable before alerting its users.

Developed in partnership with Twitter, its ‘Dataminr for News’ product enables newsrooms around the world to quickly discover information before it becomes news. For example, it alerted CNN about the Maryland mall shooting, and about the Beijing bound flight that had to turn around due to turbulence, much before the news broke out.

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Consumer Insights: Frrole

Frrole is the first company that significantly understands the users behind social conversations. It analyses demographics, psychometrics, brand preferences, purchase behavior and content affinity of users based on what they post on social media. Using derived insights of this analysis, it helps companies measure real-time shifts in audience characteristics, analyze past buying behavior and predict future patterns.

An example of its typical offering would be a brand looking to understand how consumers in its industry & segment have changed over the last three months, and what do the current breed of its consumers prefer, speak about and intend to buy.

Location Specific Trends Discovery: Banjo

Banjo divides the planet into more than 35 billion square blocks and discovers potentially important news and trends coming from each such block in real-time. It does this by noticing sudden change in social activity from one of the blocks, or tone of posts from that area. Banjo also ‘takes’ the user to the actual scene of an event and provides chronological stream of posts, photos, videos in a timeline format, enabling users to relive the moments before the event took place.

For a marketer, it creates a huge opportunity to instantly know any change in conversations about its brand, along with the location where this ‘deviation from normal’ happened.

Real-time Audience Interaction: Spredfast

Spredfast helps brands and media integrate real-time social content into their marketing campaigns and digital assets. Curating social data into any digital property, it enables real-time audience interactions and multiplies the brand conversations that happen during a large event or a brand campaign. It also allows filtering and moderation of the content not suitable for display.

An example of how a brand can use Spreadfast is by creating a marketing campaign, where it is displaying interesting tweets, images, videos posted by users about its newly launched product. This content can be curated on the Web, at the large display during an event or on live TV.

Facebook Topical Insights: Datasift

Datasift has been the largest independent social data reseller, but in the last few years it is moving away from being a reselling company to an intelligence company. Its Pylon platform is one of those developments, making Datasift the only company in the world to provide Facebook topical insights to anybody interested. With Pylon, companies now have access to anonymous and aggregated insights from Facebook, which had earlier been unavailable.

VEDO Intelligence, Datasift’s another recent product, allows its customers to feed-in a huge amount of their internal data (customer records, order records) and get machine-learning algorithms based on actionable insights.

On demand Context Analysis: Crimson Hexagon

Crimson Hexagon helps brands find answers to contextual questions from social data by allowing them to train the system themselves. The training process allows understanding a topic more deeply by tracking not just a few keywords, but the whole context around it. Users can train the system’s sentiment and spam algorithms, and are able to generate meaningful insights from keywords-based standard dashboards.

An example is to measure the tone in which people are talking about a newly launched product. By defining keywords related to the product, its competition and its segment, and by training the sentiment algorithms, the brand can accurately measure the online sentiment about its product.

Predictive Analytics: IBM Watson

IBM’s foray into analytics begun with a huge $1 Bn dedicated to the product. With Watson, IBM aims to solve customers’ pain of filtering out insights from huge datasets and predict useful patterns, without having to know anything about statistics. Its recent partnership with Twitter to analyze complete Twitter data opened the doors for Watson.

Watson allows users to input their own datasets, visualize the resulting insights and get predictive patterns, which can be consumed for decision-making or used to create sharable infographics. An example of the questions it can answer is ‘which brands are likely to sell more this quarter, or ‘which deals are likely to close in this month’.