SAS Launches Social Media Analytics

As social media networks continue to be influential communication channels, banks need to be aware of how they are perceived in social media networks as well as more traditional media. SAS has come out with analytics software that monitors a bank's reputation (and its competition) by product line across Twitter, Facebook, and other social media forums as well as the general online press.

SAS Social Media Analytics archives and analyzes more than two years of social media conversations from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, discussion forums, blogs and more. It reports and provides dashboards showing online communities' sentiments about a company's products or brands, who is influencing them, and how social media conversations affect business results.

SAS says its software can collect and analyze huge quantities of data, both structured and unstructured, from internal and external sources. It can integrate with CRM and marketing systems to align social media monitoring with overall business strategies. It includes predictive analytics to forecast future volume of social media conversations, and then predict their impact on the business. This helps companies allocate resources, create "what-if" scenarios and correlate marketing metrics like brand preference, Web traffic, online campaign effectiveness and media mix. Where statistical models can miss colloquialisms and slang, SAS says its software lets marketers and analysts adjust the rules that assign sentiment to topics and apply subject-matter expertise to improve statistical approaches and better classify text. The solution is being offered as an on demand solution.