RESEARCH & RESOURCES

SAS Social Media Analytics Extracts Value from Social Media

New program helps B2B and B2C marketers get real-time, real-world value from social media data for better business decisions

Note: TDWI’s editors carefully choose vendor-issued press releases about new or upgraded products and services. We have edited and/or condensed this release to highlight key features but make no claims as to the accuracy of the vendor's statements.

Global corporations are seeking ways to convert social media data into better customer relationships, stronger customer service, enhanced marketing efforts and improved bottom-line results. They are struggling to derive practical insight from a flood of online conversation data and apply it to real-world decisions. Corporate marketers and agencies want to integrate social data across all areas of their businesses, answer key questions, and apply the answers to specific business decisions. SAS has released new software to help enterprises realize the business benefits of embracing social media a reality.

SAS Social Media Analytics is designed to meet the needs of marketers in medium and large companies. It helps them understand, predict, and act based on social media data. SAS’ new on-demand software can archive and analyze more than two years of social media conversations (from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, discussion forums, blogs, and the like) and shows marketers how people feel about their products or brands, who is influencing them, and how social media conversations affect business results. They can immediately apply answers to brand strategies, media placement, public relations, and customer care activities.

SAS Social Media Analytics is built on SAS’ experience in advanced analytics and data integration. SAS Social Media Analytics features:

  • Enterprise-level Capabilities: SAS Social Media Analytics can collect and analyze huge quantities of data, both structured and unstructured, from internal and external sources. Integrating with CRM and marketing systems, the solution aligns social media monitoring with overall business strategy and tactics.

  • A Long-term View: The application maintains a continuous archive of online data, stretching back more than two years at the start, building over time the ability to understand trends and update historical analyses based on new information.

  • Predictive Analytics: The software can quantify influence, forecast future volume of social media conversations, and predict their impact on the business. This helps companies allocate resources, create “what-if” scenarios and correlate key marketing metrics like brand preference, Web traffic, online campaign effectiveness, and media mix.

  • Extensible Language Processing: Statistical models miss colloquialisms and slang. Unlike “black-box” offerings, SAS lets marketers and analysts adjust the rules that assign sentiment to topics and apply subject-matter expertise to improve statistical approaches and better classify text. This hybrid approach provides more accurate sentiment extraction rules that give a more complete picture of customer likes and dislikes and better answers to business questions.

  • Multi-language Support: SAS Social Media Analytics can understand and classify conversations in 13 distinct languages including Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.

  • Ability to Take Action: Even the best data analysis is only useful if it reaches decision makers on time, in an easily understood manner. SAS Social Media Analytics delivers real-time insights through Web-based dashboards, reports, and workflow-enabled alerts. This enables organizations to respond in a timely and consistent fashion across brands, business units and service groups.

SAS Social Media Analytics is offered globally as an OnDemand solution, providing users with analysis with the ability to get the solution up and running quickly.

More information is available at www.sas.com/businessanalytics/.

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