Social networks catch more business attention

Rodney Gedda

Rodney Gedda is the former deputy editor of CIO and former editor of Techworld.

In a sign social networks are increasingly influencing business strategies, applications for Web analytics and customer support are announcing automated processing of social media content. Today I ran with an interview with Nick Holmes a Court of BuzzNumbers, a company formed to make sense of the all the mentions of a business that happen on the wider Internet, not just the established media properties.

BuzzNumbers is not new, new – it was at CeBit earlier this year – but what I found most interesting in my conversation with Nick was the intention to provide integration components for traditional BI software.

When social media web analytics meets BI, you know we’re in the midst of a cultural change of what’s perceived as being important to the business.

It’s routine enough to track incoming support and outgoing marketing phone calls with traditional BI, but how do you gauge what millions of people all over the Internet are saying about your products or service levels?

That’s where startups like BuzzNumbers come in.

On a similar note, Juan Carlos Perez writes news about help desk software vendor ZenDesk adding support for Twitter messages.

Zendesk users can now flag posts on Twitter that mention their company and set up a formal process within Zendesk to address the customer comment.

This is an example of one vendor developing social media monitoring directly into an application. The BuzzNumbers approach is to monitor everything then plug into a corporate application where desired.

Either way, it’s an interesting trend in business software development. Operating systems are becoming more social and so are higher-level applications.

Rodney Gedda is Editor of TechWorld Australia. Follow Rodney on Twitter at @rodneygedda. Rodney's e-mail address is rodney_gedda@idg.com.au. Follow TechWorld Australia on Twitter at @Techworld_AU