By Anne Widjaja
In a bid to help companies utilise ‘social intelligence’ more effectively, SAP AG has announced it will resell NetBase’s solutions as the SAP Social Media Analytics application by NetBase.
Currently many companies remain trapped by passively monitoring or collecting social media, according to a report by Forrester Research analyst Zach Hofer-Shall, but they should instead aim to gather “social intelligence”, which will “drive [a company’s] marketing and business strategy using the data that social media creates”.
According to SAP, the SAP Social Media Analytics application is a response to this need to extract more sophisticated market insights from the chatter on social media.
“SAP customers have recognised that social media offers them great potential beyond listening to and engaging with their customers,” said Sanjay Poonen, president, Global Solutions, SAP.
“We believe that sophisticated sentiment analysis is at the core of a variety of business decisions. NetBase offers scalable, more accurate technology tools that are easy to integrate with SA solutions; and iterative analysis capabilities that will allow businesses to take advantage of social media as a strategic data source.”
As a solution extension product, SAP Social Media Analytics functions by processing billions of social media posts across millions of sites globally in order to extract real-time structured market insights and metrics.
It uses an advanced natural language processing (NLP) engine to read and categorise each one of these posts according to the opinions, emotions and behaviour that the market is expressing.
Unlike other solutions, users can choose if they would like to specify a subject or not before collecting data, and can access more than one year’s worth of this normalised data on demand from the ConsumerBase, a massive social intelligence warehouse.
Built-in dashboards also tap into the ConsumerBase to deliver up-to-date metrics and detailed breakdowns on themes such as key conversation drivers compared to competition and trending over time, and passion intensity. This data can be used for enterprises to discover customer needs and market trends; to quantify perceptions about products, services and companies; and to effectively track their success in the market.
Stan Sthanunathan, vice president, Marketing Strategy and Insights, The Coca-Cola Company, has certainly learnt the value of social media in his role marketing the biggest brand in the world.
“The social web provides marketers with an unprecedented opportunity to transform the way that we understand our consumers and go to market,” said Sthanunathan.
“The companies that can listen carefully to what the market is saying, understand these perceptions clearly, and act confidently are the ones that will gain competitive advantage. Hundreds of solutions claim to capture consumer sentiment, but NetBase stands alone in its ability to help us get to the bottom of opinions, emotions and behaviours to help us get to the bottom of opinions, emotions and behaviours.”
“Before social media, businesses were in control of their brand messaging,” said Peter Caswell, CEO, NetBase. “Now, the market is saying what brands are really about. To keep ahead of the curve, next-generation companies need to adopt a new customer-to-business (C2B) operating model that runs at the speed of social media and can deliver what the market wants. NetBase has invested in the enterprise-ready social intelligence platform that C2B companies need. We are excited to be collaborating with SAP to help them make this transformation globally.”
