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The entanglement of social media analysis (SMA) and customer relationship management (CRM) is moving right along. It was inevitable, really, as companies realized the need to interact with customers through social media. The interesting question becomes, will they want engagement features in an SMA platform or monitoring and analytics in a CRM platform?

Adding process to SMA
From an SMA perspective, process management is an obvious addition to social media monitoring capabilities—once you find a customer with a problem, you want to fix the problem. Scale that beyond a handful of customers, and you need a system that can track your progress. Pieces to consider:

1. Discovery
   Finding relevant mentions of a company is a fundamental building block of SMA.

2. Tagging
   While we're in an analytics platform, let's assign some metadata to the item for future analysis.

3. Triage
   Decide which items require a response and prioritize. You might filter on sentiment, topic, or influence. Some items might receive an automated response at this stage.

4. Assignment, delegation and reassignment
   Who owns the response? It's not just for accountability, ownership relieves others of spending time on an item. The system should be able to handle ownership changes to support escalation and assignment to specialists.

5. Track to closure
   Classic customer service management—what's the status of an open item? Open-item analysis gives management a tool to manage workload and understand current incidents (the metadata from step 2 will be useful).

6. Measure results
   Now, we're back in the analytics realm and can look at the results through customer-service and media-analysis lenses.
   

From a client perspective, the question becomes, which platform do you use as a base—SMA, CRM, or something else?

The workflow features in some SMA platforms support this type of process, which can also be used in media relations or other contexts (action items aren't just for customer service). Other vendors provide tagging that can be kludged into workflow features. So you could choose to build your processes on an SMA platform.

Adding social media to CRM
The heavyweights of CRM are beginning to add social media features to their products, creating new options. Their existing installations will help them, especially in more conservative customers.

• Salesforce announced Twitter support in Service Cloud, including analytics and interaction. Service Cloud already promised interaction with online communities and social networks.

• SAP demoed Twitter analytics based on BusinessObjects Text Analysis during the Business Suite 7 launch (via KD Nuggets).

• Oracle will have integration of Clarabridge Smart Response with Siebel CRM this fall.
  

You got peanut butter on my chocolate!
Larry Dignan says of SAP's Twitter demo,

...it does show an increasing amount of integration with social networking tools. If corporate data is merged with the anecdotal tips from customers and partners there could be real insight.

This Holy Grail of insight is what a lot of vendors–Salesforce, Oracle and SAP–are chasing.

A few SMA companies have been talking about integration with other enterprise systems for a while. It's time to think seriously about how things fit together when established enterprise software companies start adding features that are the core of more specialized systems.

One of the more interesting sessions at BarCamp Charlotte was on using social media for social change. We didn't make much progress for the non-profits in attendance; mostly we learned that they need to connect with people who would like to help them. The session did, however, prime me to notice when two different programs focused on truly global issues wandered across my awareness the same day. What started as a discussion about building word of mouth for a fundraiser shifted to something much more ambitious.

zyOzy
I learned about zyOzy (zee-Oh-zee) when @zyOzyfounder followed me on Twitter. For me, at least, that still gets some attention. zyOzy applies a mix of events, social media and entrepreneurship to support efforts to end extreme poverty in Africa and India.

In addition to their blog, the site links to an extended online presence that includes Squidoo, MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and a wiki. Who says you need a budget for an integrated media campaign?

Ushahidi
An old friend who now works in the NGO world pointed me toward Ushahidi, a platform for crowdsourcing crisis information. Ushahidi's original project compiled and mapped incident reports in Kenya during its 2008 post-election crisis. Reports were collected from citizen reporters using mobile phones.

The underlying technology is now being developed into an open-source platform that will be available for public and private monitoring of active situations anywhere. While in private beta, Ushahidi is being used for current projects focusing on Gaza, Congo, and South Africa, as well as a follow-up Kenya project.

What can you do with almost no budget?
"Social media are free" is the first myth to be busted—especially in a corporate marketing context—but most of the costs are driven by the need to spend time building social media programs. Free social media tools and open-source platforms, such as Ushahidi or the BuzzMonitor, put a lot of capability in the hands of NGOs that are more likely to have time and volunteers than a big budget.

I reprised the RSS tricks session at BarCamp Charlotte on Saturday, where a popular trick was generating RSS feeds for sites that don't provide them. I use this to keep up with companies who don't have feeds for their press releases; it's also good for finding out about the public launch of stealth-mode companies.

Here are the companies I've found who create RSS feeds from web pages.

• Feed43
  
• Feedity
  
• Feedwhip
  
• Page2RSS
  

If you know of others, mention them in the comments, and I'll add them to the list.

Dapper can create feeds from sites without existing feeds, too, but it's more complicated than the change alerts that other services generate. Mozenda goes farther into data scraping with its commercial service, but it's overkill for basic site monitoring.

A site-provided feed is better than this scraping approach—especially when it comes to sites with rotating content (such as client quotes). But when there's no feed and you really want to know when new content is added, these tools are helpful for pulling data into an RSS-centric information environment.

A few recent projects have reminded me how much value I get from Delicious, a useful service with a funny name (though not as funny as the original del.icio.us). It's a prime example of a social computing tool whose value isn't immediately obvious to newcomers, who probably get lost as soon as it's described as (take your pick) a social tagging, sharing, or bookmarking site. Delicious is increasingly important in my own work, so I decided to share some specifics on using it to find, save and publish information.

1. Save bookmarks for my own use.
   Let's start with the obvious. Tagging is more effective than filing bookmarks, or at least it's a lot easier to find them later. Remember to back them up to your computer occasionally, though. Free services have been known to shut down.

2. Autopost bookmarks to my blog.
   Those "links for 1/25/09" posts come from Delicious, which automatically creates a post based on each day's tags. Lists of links with no comments aren't too useful, so I make a point of adding original commentary to almost every item (a trick I learned from the bloggers of RedMonk—thanks, guys). That original content also makes it possible to...

3. Use Delicious feeds to build dynamic web sites.
   This is one of my favorite RSS tricks: use Feed Informer to place feeds from Delicious on web sites (look for the link—virtually every page on Delicious has a feed). The commentary is already there for the link posts on the blog, so each link has original content to go with it. Delicious offers linkrolls that do the same thing, but Feed Informer offers more editorial control and the ability to manage feed content. The real secret here is that every tag in your account has its own RSS feed, so you're not limited to the everything-you-tag feed.

   Tag feeds let me send different content to multiple sites with just one workflow. So, for example, all of my tagged items show up on my vanity site, while subject-specific tags cause items to appear at Social Media Analysis, Managing Social Media or International Affairs. There's no extra work associated with supporting multiple sites—just add the right tag.

   If I tag something I don't want to publish, I just check the "Do Not Share" box to keep it private.

4. Subscribe to Delicious feeds from interesting people.
   I subscribe to the feeds of a few people who pay attention to subjects I care about. When they tag something, there's a good chance it will be useful. If you find yourself following multiple people this way, add them to your network on Delicious and subscribe to that feed. Subscribing to individual user feeds doesn't alert your source that you're following them like the network feature does.

   If reading other people's tag list seems like an intrusion, remember that they have the Do Not Share box, too. Delicious users have complete control over how much they share. And if you're tagging items yourself, remember that your shared items really are public.

5. Subscribe to tag feeds to find new sources.
   This little tip potentially puts every Delicious user to work for you: subscribe to the feed for tags in your field (for example, web analytics). Delicious suggests related tags when you search, so it's easy to find likely keywords. Now, when anyone on Delicious finds an item in your area of interest, you'll find out about it. Sometimes, this leads to the discovery of interesting people, too.

   I have all of Delicious finding things for me. How big is your research staff?
   

That's how I use it. How's it working for you?

What do you want that you can't have today? Specifically, what would you like to see in a social media analysis tool or service that you can't get (as far as you know)? Most of the vendors are probably reading this blog, so here's a chance to air your wish list while I get out of the way. I'll start with one that Lee Odden mentioned on Twitter yesterday.

SMA for SEM
Lee wants an automated keyword analysis tool for social media sites (process described by Marty Weintraub):

Really need to the social media monitoring industry to step up and come up with a good keyword analysis tool specific to social media sites
@leeodden

Lee heard from three companies in response (ok, the rest of you need to monitor social media keywords on Twitter). Is anyone else working on that application or want to talk about it (publicly or privately)?

What else do you need in 2009?
Open mic time. What's on your wish list? Mention it in the comments, and I can guarantee that companies in a position to offer it will see your suggestions. You might even hear from someone who already does it.

Following the announcement of the Lexalytics merger, I wrote that the availability of off-the-shelf text analytics and custom software development suggested some questions about technology strategy for social media analysis vendors. The main question is an old one in software: Build or buy? The follow-up flows from a value chain analysis, and it sets up a series of decision points for the build/buy decision. It turns out that a social media analysis platform is built from a few, basic building blocks, and a decision to build a custom system doesn't imply a decision to build every part.

Three basic building blocks
The technology behind monitoring and analyzing social media content fits into three basic categories: content sourcing, analytics, and the software application that provides end-user features, such as dashboards, reports, and alerts. Many service providers add value beyond what is baked into their software, of course, but these are the basic technology building blocks. What makes them interesting is that each generates a potential product that can be offered as the "buy" option to other companies.

• Content sourcing
  The first step in analyzing social media content, sourcing includes source discovery, content aggregation, filtering and metadata tagging. The result is a feed of relevant content data, with duplicates, spam and other noise removed. Feeds of traditional media sources have been available for years; syndicated content sourcing is available for social media types now.

• Analytics
  The next step is analysis of the content, also known as text analytics. The system extracts key words, concepts and sentiment from individual messages; depending on the vendor, it may also evaluate messages and sources for influence, demographics, location, audience size, and more. This is the hard part, which inspires the question of whether computer analysis is good enough.

  Perhaps assuming that text analytics must be homegrown, many vendors skip the analytics entirely, using human analysts or leaving metrics out of their product. But text analytics has its own build or buy decision. The technology is available from software companies in the business intelligence market, and at least two companies focusing on social media, Lexalytics and Leximancer.

• Application
  Content sourcing and analytics constitute checklist features in a social media analysis platform: "Sentiment? Check!" They represent a lot of work, but it's hard to tell whose works better. The application software, on the other hand, is what clients see, and it provides many opportunities for evaluation. Is the user interface dated and clunky or sleek and current? How is content presented? What can users do with it? How easy is it to explore the data or create reports?

  The once clear line between dashboards and social media analysis platforms for workgroups has blurred over the past year. Outside sofware development services will tend to increase the capabilities of dashboards from less traditionally technical vendors.

Room for differention
Syndicated and licensed components don't lead directly to commmoditization, but the threat is there for vendors who fall behind in capabilities. There's still room for differentiation, especially in application features, not to mention the research and consulting services many vendors offer in addition to their systems. But separating the build or buy decision into at least three discreet decisions does have effects:

• Lower barriers to entry. New entrants—startups or established players in adjacent markets—can launch social media analysis tools without building everything from the ground up.

• Higher baseline expectations. Dashboards from companies without strong technology traditions will soon include advanced technologies. Basic monitoring dashboards are becoming commodities (witness the $5/month entry pricing).

• Fewer reinvented wheels. Vendors can compete on their strengths in content sourcing, analytics or application development. External sources remove the need to develop their own capabilities in areas outside of their core strengths.

This should be good news for customers: the tools continue to improve, and vendors will compete on what really adds value. For vendors, the question is back to basics: which parts of your system are really special, and which might be better outsourced? It's a question to reconsider from time to time as the market for building blocks matures.

Add BackType to the list of useful, free tools for monitoring social media (via IntelFusion). BackType, which launched this week, is a search engine for blog comments. The web site provides a convenient mechanism for finding comments by an individual or on a topic, with a social network-style "follow" feature and the now-standard RSS feeds for any search. This looks like a solid addition to the toolkit, useful for tracking your own mentions and for developing an understanding of interesting individuals.

Some ideas for first steps with BackType:

1. Search for comments about your company and products. Subscribe to the feeds.

2. Create an account with your usual handle and complete the profile. You want to give the right impression to people who search for your comments (and use the link to send them to your blog/site).

3. Develop a better understanding of individuals by searching for their comments. What blogs are they reading? What other topics do they find interesting? Influencer profiling is one application; hiring is another.

4. Follow a thought leader (subscribe to the RSS feed if you want to be stealthy) to discover new sources.

It's unclear, so far, how thorough BackType's search is, but this looks like a tool with interesting possibilities, especially in source discovery and profiling. It's also a reminder that everything is searchable online, and your contributions in different venues will eventually be rolled up into one big profile.

If you're building an in-house social media capability—whether in an agency or corporate environment—your needs for social media monitoring and analysis are a bit different from other companies. The basics of collecting data and generating metrics and reports are the same, but hands-on workgroups have special requirements.

On some level, many social media analysis companies can help you build your own capabilities. The nearly ubiquitous interactive dashboard is a hands-on tool for clients who want to interact with the data, but they're a better fit for individual analysts. Some companies really focus on developing platforms for companies building their own capabilities.

What's different
On top of the core analytical and reporting capabilities, social media analysis platforms for workgroups tend to include features like these:

• Multi-user environment
  
• User account management
  
• Multi-client awareness (for agencies)
  
• Delegation and tracking features

There's more, of course—especially when you get into the secret sauce that these companies cook up. Features vary wildly, and even the basic philosophies differ, but those are the basics that set workgroup platforms apart from the more numerous dashboards.

The other distinction is harder to see, because it's embedded in the business: these companies are oriented toward supporting in-house social media capabilities. Many dashboards, on the other hand, are a secondary service from companies whose clients typically want finished reports from their vendors.

The list
Vendors with monitoring and analysis platforms for the in-house social media team:

• Alterian (formerly Techrigy)
  
• Attensity
  
• Attentio
  
• Biz360
  
• Brandtology
  
• Brandwatch
  
• Buzzcapture
  
• BuzzGain
  
• Buzzient
  
• Digimind
  
• dna13
  
• Dow Jones Insight
  
• eCairn
  
• evolve24
  
• Filtrbox
  
• InfoNgen
  
• Lexalytics
  
• Linkfluence
  
• MediaMiser
  
• Metrica
  
• Netemic
  
• Networked Insights
  
• Press Army
  
• Radian6
  
• ReputationHQ
  
• Scout Labs
  
• Sentiment Metrics
  
• Smmart
  
• StartPR
  
• Synthesio
  
• Sysomos
  
• Trackur
  
• Visible Technologies
  
• Vocus
  
• Whitevector
  

You'll find profiles of most of these companies (and a lot more) in the second edition of the Guide to Social Media Analysis, which is now available.

I can just hear people shouting, "you missed us!" Go ahead, leave a comment, and I'll add you to the list.

BarCampRDU was Saturday, and as usual, it was great for meeting bright and interesting people who don't live so far away (and yes, I wore the tweetworthy shirt). I get a small thrill out of my international conversations, but it's hard to beat the wandering conversations that happen in person. Just one ranged from mobile augmented reality systems and science classes for home schoolers to n-dimensional space and current theories about the shape of the universe. In keeping with the general tone of the day, I went with a more technical session this year, sharing some of the tools I use for manipulating and repurposing RSS feeds.

I'm not a programmer, but I do like playing with data, so tools that let me play without having to learn real programming skills are a big help. When it comes to RSS, these tools fit perfectly:

• FeedBurner
  Beyond the statistics that people usually like, FeedBurner is great for insulating your subscribers from behind-the-scenes changes. I've been using FeedBurner since the beginning of this blog, so when I moved it from Blogspot, I was able to make the change transparent to subscribers by having them on the FeedBurner feed instead of the blog's native feed.

• Feed Informer
  Formerly FeedDigest, this is my workhorse tool for combining and reformatting feeds. When I moved the blog, I used FeedDigest to combine the old and new feeds until I had ten posts on the new site. Feed Informer is also my tool for adding blog feeds and Delicious tag feeds to web pages (for example, the entry page on net-savvy.com shows recent posts from two blogs, including excerpts stripped of their HTML). Delicious provides a similar capability with its link rolls feature, but Feed Informer gives more formatting flexibility with its ability to edit the HTML and pick up existing styles using CSS.

  For the session, I made a quick and dirty dashboard that pulled BarCampRDU content from Google Blog Search, Flickr and Twitter, all using Feed Informer. If you know enough HTML to make a web page, Feed Informer gives you everything else you need to incorporate feeds into web sites. It has lots of output options, but for the non-programmer, the Javascript option is easiest.

• Dapper
  Similar to Feed Informer in its ability to manipulate and repurpose feed content, Dapper can also pull content directly from web sites (yes, they talk about getting permission when you do this). It has different output options, including pre-built widgets and straight HTML, so it may be the tool for somewhat different scenarios. I haven't had time to play with Dapper yet, but it looks promising.

• AideRSS
  Filter feeds based on what other people think of its contents. Comments, delicious tags and links contribute to a score that rates each post against others from the same feed. AideRSS creates new feeds with different levels of selectivity; its dashboard is also a quick way to see which posts of your own blog are being tagged, etc.

• FeedBlitz
  RSS to email with visibility into subscribers and subscriber management.
  

What I didn't cover:

• Yahoo Pipes
  I talked with a few folks about presenting it, but they said it was really too complicated for my theme. The consensus was that Pipes benefits from a programmer mindset, and it's harder to use than the tools I showed.

• Feeds from sites that don't offer feeds
  Feedwhip or Page2RSS monitor web sites and generate feeds of the changes. I'm sure there are a lot more, but how many do you need?

• ZapTXT
  RSS to IM, text or email. Optional keyword filtering makes this primarily an alerting service.

RSS In, RSS Out
All of these services take RSS as an input. The beauty of the feed manipulation sites is that they also offer RSS outputs, so you can build interesting applications by running feeds through several of them on the way to their destination. It's important to think about the order, though. Merging feeds and filtering the result with AideRSS gives a different result than merging filtered feeds from AideRSS.

For a more detailed example of how you might combine these tools, read Marshall Kirkpatrick's description of how he built a conference dashboard from feeds. If you want to try Yahoo Pipes, try Marshall's introduction to Yahoo Pipes video, too.

From my perspective, the whole point of these services is that they're easy to use. If you know a little HTML and you're comfortable poking around at new software, you'll be able to use these in minutes. And if you build something cool based on what you picked up in this session—mention it in the comments so we can see it.

Translation on the fly?
Speaking of working with RSS, has anyone found a solid solution for translating feeds yet? I subscribe to some blogs in languages I don't know, which can be a bit comical.

Update: Mloovi uses Google Translate to translate feeds (via RWW, TechCrunch). The free version includes ads, or you can pay to remove them. I'm giving it a try.

I've heard a lot about text analytics since I started tracking the companies who monitor and analyze social media. I've been particularly interested in the different directions people go with the same basic source data and analytical techniques. It's not all sentiment and PR; once you start extracting opinions and themes from streams of online content, the next step is to look for correlations between online trends and external events. In marketing, you're probably looking for a link to sales; some of the companies I talk to are more interested in stock prices. But if you want to know what's really wrong with the world, you might start with Europe Media Monitor (EMM) from the European Commission's Joint Research Centre.

EMM pulls current world news from online sources, clustering reports by topic and tagging them with location and language. The real charm of the service is its optimistic focus on themes such as terrorism, communicable disease, political unrest and conflict. Clustering makes it easy to track current news on your specific combination of interests in the language(s) you can read. Of course, everything is multilingual, with "about 19" languages represented (the language filter is always there to keep things readable).

The result is a customizable news service available to government and private users through web-based dashboards, RSS and email. The site has three major components:

• NewsBrief, a quick view of the most active stories and themes, updated every 10 minutes. In addition to the global summary, NewsBrief has current news for 13 EMM themes, EC Directorates, selected international organizations, and a handful of topics focused on the European Union.

• NewsExplorer, a global news dashboard with drill-down analysis on nations, individuals and other entities. Detail ages show a breakdown of recent news by theme, plus excerpts of current articles.

  

• MedSys, a real-time dashboard and alerting system for medical and health-related issues. Detail views focus on specific diseases or bioterrorism threats, along with a volume trend chart and interactive map for drill-down analysis. In addition to email, MedSys can send alerts by SMS.

A link to EMM Labs leads to more projects, not as fully baked as the featured projects.

Registered organizations (governments?) get additional filtering and reporting options. There's also a restricted version of the MedSys site with additional information.

If you're a news junkie, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to throw your productivity out the window, but this is worth checking out. The question I'm finding most interesting lately is, "what else is this good for?" Given the history of interest in text analytics by intelligence and law enforcement agencies, it's no surprise to know that they're still looking for ways to predict the future. It is a surprise to find such interesting sources available to the public.

Hat tip to Penny Herscher, who pointed out the article from Wired.