As stated by SAP:
In response to demand, SAP has taken a major step to offer an integrated solution with the ability to combine traditional business analytics with social analytics to reveal insights that drive business results. SAP Social Media Analytics by NetBase enables enterprises to create an enterprise social analytics platform that offers a wider and deeper perspective on a range of activities.
The key term is ‘in response to demand’ as it is quite clear that interest in Social Analytics is no longer the exclusive domain of early adopters, but is rapidly becoming a critical capability within the Enterprise marketplace. This is also, to some degree, a competitive response to Salesforce.com in particular, who has moved very quickly to integrate and incorporate the capabilities of Radian6 into their offerings and drive new capabilities through deep integration.
The trend is also being driven by what NetBase likes to call ‘C2B’ – the idea that control of the relationship between companies and their customers is rapidly shifting from the former to the latter. As stated in a blog post by NetBase CMO Lisa Joy Rosner:
As a marketer in high technology, I’m in a position to see trends early, and it’s clear that social media is ushering in a fundamental paradigm shift. The old model was one where businesses created products and communicated from the inside out; what social media has done is to flip that model. At the end of the day, no matter what business you’re in, your customer should be at the center of your strategy. Companies getting ahead now are ones where information and insight often flow from the outside in. Instead of the traditional business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) models, consumers are now in charge, and smart businesses have already started to run on a CUSTOMER to-business model, or C2B.
In other words, as I’ve been arguing for quite some time, companies need to re-focus their attention from what’s going on inside their organizations to what’s happening externally – and center their efforts in the ‘place’ where their customers are spending their time and energies. Increasingly – and regardless of industry – that place is increasingly on, in and around Social networks, and understanding the activity of customers, prospects and influencers – and interpreting and reacting to that activity – is a key capability which can no longer be ignored.
We should expect to see a recovering economy in 2012 featuring many more strategic alliances between traditional Enterprise and ‘new-breed’ Social Analytics vendors – and also for M&A activity to be quite high as Enterprise customers – and their customers – voice their needs to extend and integrate their analytics platforms and efforts.
