Social media monitoring is an important base to cover. But unless you cover all the bases, you’ll never be able to pull meaningful KPIs from social media activity alone.
While they don’t a free version like Feedly or Netvibes, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is definitely the social media monitoring tool closest to unlocking KPIs by analyzing social media activity against other business metrics.
Let me explain.
A social media monitoring platform without analytics is fine for following news trends, but for analyzing big data, RSS Readers themselves are basically useless.
Through third-party deals with providers like Bitext, Clarabridge, Klout and others, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud insights manager can be used to apply algorithms to big data to surface insights. Netvibes works with a single provider owned by their parent company Dassault Systemes called Exalead to do semantic analysis.
Netvibes wants to be the solution businesses use to compare social media activity to more conventional business metrics likes sales revenue or market growth. But they need to work with others to pull in that data. Salesforce, on other hand, already has the data.
Salesforce started as CRM SaaS. But through a barrage of rapid fire acquisitions between April 2010 and May 2012, expanding their software service offerings to marketing, customer service, HR, collaboration and innovation software as a service products as well. That’s a whole lot of data.
From the client’s perspective, the advantage of having all their data with one company — assuming Salesforce can effectively integrate them, which they’re still working on – gets them closers to the promise of being able to compare social signals to business metrics. Having all that data in one place with integrated analytics gets them much, much closer than their competitors to finding the soul of big data.
I tweeted a link that opined if Salesforce were to acquire a company like Quicken or Sage and integrate them as well, they’d have access to every piece of data a company would need to shape and track the KPIs that matter most to them. Then I got this tweet.
@ericschwartzman …and as for data trifecta, no need 2 acquire quicken. Financialforce is @benioff‘s ace in the hole c: @joeciarallo
— Hugh Macken (@hughmacken) May 8, 2013
Of all the paid social media monitoring solutions out there, no one has access to as broad a collection of business data sets to analyze.
As they work to integrate Radian6 and Buddy Media into the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, watch to see how seamlessly they’re able to deliver analytics that compare data sets from these two services with metrics from their CRM solution.
Remember, without analytics, big data is just noise
Disclosure: My discover and opinion was shaped, at least partially, by my comped Radian6 and Netvibes accounts.