I promised to take a look at SAS Social Media Analytics - had missed the announcements earlier this month while I was in London – and when I spoke at the Sentiment Analysis Symposium the week before last – SAS was present in force but didn’t really talk much about their new Social Media Analytics platform (which surprised me – as why were they present if not to speak about it)?

Anyway – here’s a video of that SAS® Social Media Analytics does:

There are some nice things here – like breakdowns by source – that mimic Web Analytics tools – the very thing I was criticizing about most Social Media platforms two years ago (Techrigy -then, Radian6 then) is largely solved by SAS® Social Media Analytics.

If SAS® Social Media Analytics just pulls your raw data and makes it into something like the video shows – that would be nice – though hardly revolutionary.  In fact, most of what is being shown in this video could be accomplished, more or less, by any of the other platforms I have used – but I’d need to do a little extra work to create tables Excel – etc.

More information from the SAS site says that:

Data integration and storage

• Captures online conversations from popular social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.
• Gathers customer reviews from thousands of review sites like Epinions.com, CNET and TripAdvisor.
• Identifies and integrates influential blog postings.
• Sources conversations both externally and via internal CRM systems, including Salesforce.com.
• Continuously captures and retains more than two years of conversation history.

Ok, that’s nice … agreed

Data and text mining

• Tailors topic classification.
• Customizes business rules specific to a company.
• Applies sentiment to topics within a hierarchy specific to company goals.
• Continuously improves the accuracy of sentiment identification by deploying both a statistically derived and business rules-driven

I think this stuff becomes important if your a big company that has defined processes – then this platform will allow you to take that set of processes and bring into SAS Social Media Analytics.

Media analyst workbench

• Searches source documents having verbatim comments that are the basis of analysis.
• Interprets how sentiment was applied to each document.
• Identifies each concept and the sentiment associated to that concept.
• Adjusts sentiment manually at source document level.
• Provides robust query and reporting capabilities to further analyze document repository.

Media intelligence portal

• Provides dashboard-driven insights that quickly show how core business concepts are performing.
• Enables a quick view of year-over-year comparisons of sentiment against specific business objectives.
• Drills into daily data to understand if a significant event is having inordinate impact.
• Shows verbatim comments to get context behind positive or negative sentiment.
• Shows media source to understand where advocates and critics tend to congregate.
• Shows the influence of specific sources of commentary in the blog and microblog space.

Multilingual support

• Arabic
• Chinese (both Simplified and Traditional)
• Dutch
• English (US/UK)
• French (French/Canadian)
• German (New/Old)
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Polish
• Portuguese (Portugal/Brazil)

There’s a lot to like here – but it will also take a lot of customization to get the value out of this platform – though that might not be an issue for the target audience.

I’d like to get my hands on a working copy I can customize myself – then I can tell you more.