By now many of my colleagues and a decent part of the tech press has had a chance to kick the tires and post their points of view on the grand opening of our new Social Business Index (SBI). For those that haven’t heard much about it yet, I’ll go through their useful contributions below. For those that have seen it, I wanted to provide a bit more detail on the service as well as a pair of brand new interviews I conducted with two of the individuals most closely connected to the SBI. We truly believe the index is a powerful and significant new social business intelligence platform, as well as what we hope is an invaluable and freely available public service.
Reactions to the SBI
First, let’s go through the most significant and insightful pieces in the media to tease out what the SBI is and what it can do.
One of the best summaries was by Robin Wauters of Techcrunch, who wrote:
In essence, the information service aims to provide some insights into how ‘social’ companies are, and how they stack up against similar corporations in their respective industries and their competitors, and provide some ‘social business’ benchmarks by company, subsidiary, geography, department and brand.
If Klout and PeerIndex are about trying to measure the ‘socialness’ and influence of people and rank them, Dachis Group basically wants to do the same for corporations, in real time.
It’s a good distillation of the key points, that the SBI normalizes social activities so that it can actually be measured between companies, and that it provides different key dimensions to slice and dice comparisons. It’s also updated in near real-time, which distinguishes it from virtually all of the other social business rankings.
Over at The Next Web, Courtney Boyd Myers noted the breadth and depth of the SBI’s tracking over 100 million social media accounts:
The Dachis Group says its SBI is derived from company, employee, partner/vendor, customer, engaged market and influencer data, and it is sourced from scraping sites like Twitter, Facebook, Wikis, YouTube, forums, and blogs as well as data buys, data partnerships, company contributions, and its own internal data team. It had over 100 of the world’s largest companies participating in its early access program to help cement the data and gain insights as to how the data is used.
In this way, as companies change the way they behave and in engage in these channels, and the world responds to it, the changes will be reflected in the score and other metrics that the SBI lists publicly. The SBI provides a long-awaited continuous feedback loop with social media that can be used to dramatically and quickly transform the way companies engage with the marketplace by giving them a normalized benchmark — along key performance indictators (KPIs) — to respond to.
It was Arik Hesseldahl at All Things Digital, which got right to the heart of the matter, rhetorically asking “Which Company Is the Most Social? Check the Social Business Index“:
As so many companies have learned the hard way, it doesn’t take much for an unhappy customer to organize an army of similar-minded people on Twitter. The case that always comes to mind is when in 2008 mothers got mad at Motrin, giving Johnson and Johnson a headache.
Episodes like this put the onus on companies to be social, and some do it better than others. Today the Dachis Group, an outfit that helps companies get a handle on all things social media, launched its Social Business Index which ranks, in real time, the most socially-active companies.
But some of the best descriptions of the Social Business Index came from folks at the Dachis Group. All of them are worth reading and offer a unique perspective. While probably do not have time to go through all of them, as you use the SBI and want to understand it better, they can help. These posts include:
- Introducing the Public Launch of the Social Business Index by Dachis Group CTO Eric Huddleston
- Reading the conversation cloud by XPLANE | Dachis Group’s Dave Gray
- I, For One, Welcome our New Social Data Overlords by Social Business Council founder Susan Scrupski
- Social Business Index: Bringing the Left Brain into Social Business by Dachis Group Chief Strategy Officer Peter Kim
- Social Media Measurement: This time for realz by Dachis Group’s Kate Niederhoffer
- The Social Business Index is open by Headshift | Dachis Group’s Lee Bryant
- Performance Brand Marketing and Facebook by Stuzo | Dachis Group’s Gunter Pfau
You can also read my own take on the SBI on ZDNet, exploring how it delivers on the promise of big data to bring highly innovative and emerging new capabilities to the social business community.
Finally, I was also able to sit down and catch up with the two folks that have been instrumental in creating the Social Business Index itself. The SBI is the brainchild of Dachis Group CEO Jeff Dachis himself and I was able to sit down with him and talk about his vision behind the index. I also was able to talk with our CTO, Eric Huddleston, whose technical leadership with the SBI product team made the launch of the index possible.
Interview on the SBI with Jeff Dachis
Interview on the SBI with Erik Huddleston
We’ve also been asked quite a bit over the last few days about how the index works and what it’s made of. To address this, we’ve been contributing to an informative Google+ thread that’s been building all week. It’s is a great place for those that want more details on the inner workings of the SBI as well as some thoughts on future plans. Please give us feedback on our various social channels including comments below and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
We’re pleased at the very positive reception of the SBI so far and look forward to expanding it and improving it in the very near future!
[…] The social business index round-up […]