With the continued growth of both the pubic social web and private collaboration, communication and social business tools we are creating an explosion of social data. As businesses get more deeply involved in the social business movement and as software vendors create more and different social tools there is a compelling case for tools to help businesses make sense out of all this social data. I wrote about the idea of social analytics last year. This year in our IDC Top 10 Predictions we included a prediction about social analytics: "Business applications will undergo a fundamental transformation — fusing business applications with social/collaboration software and analytics into a new generation of "socialytic" apps, challenging current market leaders." Here's a simple model that shows the concept of socilaytic platforms / apps and how they might be applied:
Some characteristics of socialytic apps might include:
- Aggregate social data from public and private social data sources (user / company selectable)
- Real-time search and monitoring
- Social metrics dashboard
- Natural language processing (NLP) with linguistic analysis capabilities
- Visualization and simulation
- Social trending
- Human search
- User configurability
I'm sure there are lot's of other characteristics and use cases for socialytic platforms and apps that will emerge as more businesses start deploying social tools over the next few years. Once the analysis capabilities are in place, businesses will undoubtedly start to look at automating decisions and building / deploying automated decision architecture-based solutions to help social analysts focus on higher value interactions. A few vendors are offering socialytic apps but the market is far from crowded at this point. An upswing in demand as companies get deeper into their social business projects should drive market growth and the development of new and varied offerings to address emerging needs.
