Enterprise Social Business Engagement Software Preview: Mike Talbot, Alterian

At the enterprise social business engagement Engaging Times Summit, Mike gave an overview of the Alterian software stack and a preview of their new platform. The key takeaway is that Alterian is not a social media company, its core competency is deep marketing data analysis. That said, their SM2 platform is one of the social media monitoring leaders [disclosure, I’m an SM2 client].

• At the end of the day, we help you understand people by systemitizing content. You can search creatively due to rich metadata layers.
• Relevance leads to engagement, and you listen to become relevant. It enables you to coordinate multiple channels and touchpoints to transform marketing. TV, Web, social media, Twitter, email.
• Don’t try to use social media to drive [legacy marketing] ideas.
• He gave us a sneak peak at their new platform, which featured a lot of drag-drop tools and deep data mining that marketers could do on the fly. They can pull together disparate data sources, fusing deep data and social media. Results can be displayed in pulldown dashboards. No technology knowledge required.
• That has been the nirvana forever, letting marketers achieve deep analysis by dragging/dropping—and not having to “call IT” to get them to customize reports.

Thoughts

• The new platform looks great, and I look forward to playing when it’s available. It looks like it will go a long way in helping companies filter and understand “the conversation” that’s relevant to them.
• Based on Alterian’s roots, I believe the platform will be strong in integrating data from diverse sources, so the emphasis will be on the “total view,” not social media per se, even though the latter is included in the mix.
• As several panelists remarked, the algorithms that power monitoring tools are quite limited as present. Language has many nuances that only humans can understand. In addition, the tools are only as good as the questions that users pose to them. Knowing what to look for that is meaningful to the business is half the battle, and it is usually an iterative process to get to where you need to go.
• That said, the tools are evolving quickly, and competition is intense.

This is part of a series of my notes and thoughts on Alterian’s Social Business Summit 2010. To see all of them, hit the Alterian tag (also in the gray box under  any post in the series). Next up: Monte Lutz on how companies have to stop being all about themselves.