SAS touts conversation monitoring tool for social media streams

LAS VEGAS: SAS has announced the forthcoming availability of a tool that allows companies to monitor social network conversations related to their brand and more actively manage their online reputation.

The Conversation Centre tool had been scheduled for release in January, but was pushed back to May and will form an addition to SAS' Social Network Analysis (SNA) software launched last year. Users can monitor conversations on Twitter for key words and phrases and their sentiment.

SAS chief technology officer Keith Collins explained to V3.co.uk that the update is based on feedback from customers, who wanted a tool to help them act on data they track.

"Applying this tool to the Twitter threads, hashtags and so forth that you want to follow and track sentiment [allows you] to trigger alerts for the ones you want staff to manage and deal with," he said.

"The tool will also pre-warn staff if they are about to reply to someone on Twitter in public so they can avoid other Twitter users from complaining merely to try and elicit the same offer a business may make to appease a genuine customer complaint."

Collins also hinted that the tool will be updated in the future to include feeds from Facebook and LinkedIn, but said that Twitter is the key social media site businesses want to track first of all.

He said the tool has an advantage over Radian6, recently bought by Salesforce.com, as it is based on unique taxonomies that SAS will create and then let firms update when required, rather than a system managed by the vendor.

"Being able to quickly modify and manage your taxonomy is extremely important. Tools that are just out of the box may be quick to set up and get going but the taxonomies are going to date by age, language and location," he said.

"So you need the ability to respond as new terms and slang evolve, otherwise your sentiment's not going to be correct. We think this is going to be one of our distinguishing features in this space."

However, Collins said that an out-of-the-box offering is something SAS will offer over time, as the base taxonomies in its systems mature to become broad enough for SMEs to buy the product on a software-as-a-service model.

SAS will be hoping that the software encourages more businesses to purchase its Social Network Analysis tool. Jonathan Hornby, marketing director for performance management at SAS, told V3.co.uk that only a handful of companies are using the product at present.