It’s no secret that online communities are producing enormous benefits for both community participants and their sponsoring companies.  In short, participants are obtaining faster answers to their customer support questions, making more informed purchasing decisions, staying in touch with other people they meet at events after the event is over, and lending their expertise (and being rewarded for it) to the companies that build communities. 

On the other hand, sponsoring companies are receiving measurable economic benefits that include reducing the cost of customer support, developing more insightful market research, innovating faster and more cost effectively, and improving the way people learn inside and outside the organization.  At Mzinga, we are working on some advanced technologies that will help organizations better analyze the interactions inside their communities. 

We call these technologies Social Analytics. 

Mzinga will be the first company to offer a robust set of graphical social analytics tools and reports to analyze community behavior and interactions.  Social Analytics will provide companies the ability to navigate the interactions of their on-line communities without violating the privacy terms of service.  We expect these Social Analytic tools to be available by the end of the year.

If I’m a corporate executive, why should I care about Social Analytics?

Very simply, tracking and analyzing your communities’ interactions – be they employee or customer interactions - can lead to insights and trends that would be difficult and expensive to acquire any other way.  In fact, in many cases, these insights and trends would be virtually impossible to acquire in any other way.  Social Analytics provides a scalable way for organizations to capture, analyze and make sense of the community interactions to make more informed business decisions.

Let’s look at the benefits Social Analytics can provide in the marketplace.  Social Analytics provides the ability to:

• Track sentiment about the company and its products
• Identify advocates, enthusiasts, and influencers
• Spot product and service problems early
• Analyze market trends and competitive threats
• Inform the product roadmap with customer priorities
• Increase advertising and sponsorship revenue

In the workplace, the benefits are equally strategic.  Social Analytics provides the capability to:

• Identify experts, achievers, and future leaders
• Gauge employee morale and sentiment
• Identify strategic opportunities by mining new ideas across the workforce
• Spot product, service, people or knowledge gaps early
• Reward the strategic contributors in various departments
• Identify process and resource issues

The benefits of understanding what’s happening in a community inside and outside your company are significant.  However, communities are very complicated and include hundreds if not millions of people who are talking about your products, services, brand and leadership.  As a result, very robust and highly automated tools such as Social Analytics are necessary to help decision makers sort through the enormous amount of data. 

For example, Mzinga currently processes more than two billion social interactions a month for our clients.  Sorting through these interactions and gaining insights from them are monumental tasks.  The science of Social Analytics streamlines that task, without violating the trust and privacy of the community members.

At Mzinga, we believe that Social Analytics will change the world for marketers, HR professionals and executives at all levels.  During the next few years, Social Analytics will fundamentally alter the landscape in which they operate and provide a framework to make better and more informed decisions.

Chip Matthes, Mzinga’s SVP of Advanced Technologies, is leading the charge in developing our Social Analytics offerings.  Listen to what Chip has to say about Mzinga’s Social Analytics initiatives.

-Rick