Social media monitoring is real-time analytics that uses complex event processing (CEP) to acquire, filter, and display events taking place in social media. Social network analysis is advanced analytics that is specifically focused on identifying and forecasting connections, relationships, and influence among individuals and groups it mines transactions, interactions, and other behavioral information that may be sourced from social media, and/or just as often from CRM, billing, and other internal systems. Social media analytics refers to BI tools-reporting, dashboarding, visualization, search, event-driven alerting, text mining, etc.–applied to information sourced from social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Question 1: Social media analytics and social network analysis: Are these simply two ways of referring to the same applications, or is there some important difference between them?.What follows, for those of you who don’t listen to podcasts, or can’t find them, is the gist of what I said on this topic: During the podcast I also trucked in another related closely related term-social media monitoring-and even alluded to social intelligence and other phrases that have gained currency. My initial impetus for the podcast was to spell out the chief distinctions between two terms that, on first glance, appear almost synonymous: social media analytics and social network analysis. In that session, I discussed the role of analytics in social media for multichannel customer relationship management (CRM). Last month I did a Forrester podcast on a topic that’s extremely hot right now: leveraging the power of social media and social networks to manage your brand, drive marketing and sales campaigns, and manage ongoing customer relationships. Yes, indeed, each analyst likes to feel that his or her marketecture terminology should rule school. More than that, many of us spend our working lives coaxing industry to march under marketing banners aligned with our pet definitions.
SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS DEFINITION PROFESSIONAL
As an industry analyst, I’m part of the professional class that delights in defining standard marketplace terminology.