Nexalogy Environics | Social Media Intelligence

While reading Claude Malaison’s blog, I came across Gartner‘s latest Hype Cycle graph. While Claude’s analysis mainly concentrated on the peak position of cloud computing and the eminent decline of the microblogging (sorry for those of you who can’t read in French) hype, my eye was drawn to the more mature technologies.

I was encouraged to see that Social Network Analysis was working its way out of the “trough of disillusionment” and onto the “path of enlightenment”. We have been working from the get-go on advanced analysis techniques to mine knowledge from these masses of information and have gone from explaining what blogs are to dealing with the “disillusionment”.

Many of our clients (mostly those in big PR firms), have tried web-based social media monitoring/analysis services and have been disappointed in the actual amount of added value for business these services provide (in fact, just this morning one of our clients made that exact comment). Online social media monitoring services have made excellent advances in designing dashboards for presenting collected social media data and are completely sufficient for illustrating the most obvious trends in data, but the analysis part of social media analysis is usually quite light, as automated “one fits all” analysis tends to be.

The maturing of social network analysis spells a bright future for providers who have the expertise to adjust the analysis of social network data to create concrete solutions and solve real problems businesses might have. The NYT described this well earlier this month in an article about the increasing role of statisticians in social media analysis.

Let’s just hope that we can keep riding the wave onto the “plateau of productivity”.