Monday, I talked about the Convey API, a new offering from Converseon that earned DataWeek’s Innovator of the Year on Social Media. My point Monday was that the Convey API allows the people who need accurate sentiment analysis to pay for it, even though monitoring platforms are getting cheaper and cheaper and not offering that kind of accuracy. But that’s only half the story. To me, the bigger opportunity for accurate sentiment analysis is how it can be used for entirely new applications that go way beyond social media monitoring.
Social media monitoring has evolved into a vertically integrated industry–you buy the data, the analysis, and the user interface from the same company. There are some exceptions to this, notably Radian6 offers text analytics plug-ins–but it’s mostly true. And for good reason. There is no marketing or PR dashboard to integrate social media into.
But that’s not the case with other uses of social media listening. Customer service has its ticketing systems. Sales has its CRM system. They won’t want a vertically integrated solution for social media listening. Complaints on Yelp need to result in open customer service tickets, not a line item on a monitoring screen. Likewise, a prospect on Twitter is just as much of a lead as a card collected for a drawing at the trade show.
So, social media needs to grow up–beyond vertical integration into a series of components that allow systems to be created that have best-in-class components at every stage. In such an environment, Converseon’s Convey API can become an important piece, especially in environments that already have dashboards.
Is the market waiting for this? As Chief Strategist of Convereon, I have a rooting interest. But watching social media listening mature is certainly interesting.
