We’ve all heard of stories that have gone viral on the internet whether they relate to a serious or comical matter—just think of United Breaks Guitars and its PR impact on United Airlines, or the burgeoning popularity of South Korean rapper Psy’s Gangnam Style. So it’s probably no surprise that there is another story out there currently doing the rounds, this time featuring Heineken, that provides yet another example of the potency as well as power of social media. In this case it relates to the potential sullying of the company’s corporate brand through an alleged association with a dog fight in Mongolia (the company responded quickly and clearly to the allegations on its website and on social media sites, but the story rumbles on several months later…). But equally importantly it’s also a keen illustration of how consumer brands or in fact any B2C business needs to think seriously about the role of analytic plays in their social media marketing strategy as a tool for providing visibility into potential issues and trends by understanding what conversations are having an impact across the public social web.

In cases like these analytics applied to social media data can help businesses extract insights from data, enabling them to get a quicker handle on the impact of a news story, dig behind a particular individual’s comments, understand whether they are influential or not, and make a timely intervention. But not only that, social analytics can also provide the valuable insights and metrics needed to help organisations measure the value and benefits of their social media marketing investments.

While there are numerous free tools that help businesses get started with these tasks many businesses are finding these offerings are hitting a wall by virtue of the limitations they have for monitoring a full range of social media channels as well as their inability to extract real meaning from the data and scale to an enterprises needs. Which is leaving many organisations with a dilemma—when looking to step up your social analytic efforts, where do you start?  In the last year at MWD we’ve conducted a considerable amount of research in the area of social analytics to help organisations navigate this tricky path, as, in our view, if used and supported correctly social analytics has the potential to support organisations in three key areas; the monitoring of social conversations, delivering a better understanding of the context behind the conversations, and ultimately helping businesses better engage with the people behind those conversations in a scalable and timely way.

For more detail on this, and to help get you started on your journey, we’re offering you the free download of a 13-page Strategic Insight report: Optimising your social media investment using social analytics. Simply click on the link to find out more. If you’re not a member already you’ll  need to register for a free account to download the report (it only takes a minute).

If you’re a bit further down the path towards selecting a tool, we’ve also compiled a complete set of social analytic profiles that provide a unique insight into the key offerings in the market and how each one can help across these core capabilities. There are profiles of IBM Cognos Consumer Insight, Jive Software, Lithium, Salesforce Radian6, SAS, Telligent and Teradata Aprimo. You can buy any of these assessments individually, or you can access all these reports (plus many more) with a low-cost annual membership to our research library.