Social Analytics Tools are Finally Getting Serious

I had the pleasure of attending the #AdobeSocial Analytics UK launch event yesterday. This was one of the better product launch events I’ve been to. The St. Pancras Hotel where the event was held is amazing. It’s a gorgeous Victorian building inside and out. Very impressive. Adobe were great hosts, the information was rich and the attendees were smart and super active on the Twitter stream.

Please see my disclaimer* at the bottom of the post.

Just over two years ago Adobe acquired Omniture and the reaction was one of shock. It seemed so weird that a business known for building products for creatives would buy an analytics company. I noted that it was completely logical since data was the new creative. And now we’re really starting to see the fruits of the acquisition. If you’d like to see more about the product itself I suggest you check out their launch site.

The product was fairly straight forward but super impressive if for no other reason that by combining a social media measurement and web analytics Adobe can give you data like Revenue Per Engagement. Think about that for a second. Revenue (how much money you made) per Engagement (all those tweets and links and likes). Adobe was quick to note that this is corollary and not perfect. But this is better than anything else that I’ve seen yet.

Their onsite web analytics were super strong and impressive, their off site social media measurement were okay, but on par with everything else that’s out there. They claim sentiment accuracy of 80-90% which is complete and total crap. No sentiment analysis is that good. As an example on a 1-10 scale their tool gave both of the following tweets a negative score of 3:

“I miss my disney channels days” and “Holyshit Disney’s Pleasure Island is a nightmare of Jersey Shore proportions.”

The first one is actually nostalgic and could be seen as a positive and the second one seems worse than a 3 to me. But I don’t blame Adobe, I just hate it when marketeers claim 80-90% accuracy. Sentiment is an indicator it’s not definitive.  It’s one data point to watch, that’s all.

Overall I’m very impressed with the product and glad to see tools getting this sophisticated. We’ve all believed that social media drives business, that there is real, tangible value in brands engaging via social media and that this leads to higher revenue. Adobe’s the first product that I’ve seen that’s finally getting us to that point. Like I said yesterday, social media is turning into serious business and for those analytically minded individuals who are working on the optimizing end of the business they’re going to need some serious tools to make it happen.

The other highlight of the event was the talk by Facebook but I’m going to save that post until next week.

*DISCLAIMER: I should note (in case the FTC reads this) that I was invited to go as a blogger not because of my role at @WaggenerEdstrom. They fed me and gave me a free Adobe branded Moleskine. Waggener Edstrom does not work with Adobe but we do work with Microsoft that competes in some ways with Adobe. And Waggener Edstrom also has our own social media analytics offerings but these are not directly competitive to Adobe Social Analytics.