Alterian Upgrades SM2 to Enhance Social Media Monitoring Performance and Capabilities with Release 4.3
by Bill Ives
Last July Alterian acquired Techrigy and its SM2 social media monitoring solution. I have used Techrigy, liked it, and wrote about them on this blog (see Techrigy Provides Comprehensive Social Media Monitoring). So I was interested to speak with Joe Stanhope, Vice President of Platform Strategy, Alterian, about where they are taking SM2. The 4.3 release of SM2 focuses on enhanced performance and scalability through more than 140 updates in architecture design, infrastructure investments and new features.
Joe said that Alterian has been focusing more on the execution side of enterprise marketing and purchased Techrigy to enhance their analytics capabilities to complement the execution capabilities. They plan to both continue to develop SM2 as a robust standalone web monitoring tool and integrate it with their Alterian Integrated Marketing Platform. The Integrated Marketing Platform serves marketing efforts at an enterprise level and has such features as the web content management, email marketing, web analytics, and campaign management. The planned integration of SM2 with this platform is part of a growing trend to bring social media monitoring into market facing enterprise applications.
In the 4.3 SM2 release they focused on upgrades that will make it more enterprise ready, address scalability and improve performance. In this context they addressed administration, workflow, reporting, and the backend technology. To enhance workflow, additional list management tools for search results, automatic assignment of results based on search criteria, distribution of notes to assigned team members, default page and language translation configurations were added. They also enhanced reach and speed for initial and subsequent searches in profile, language and country filter searches, and incremental searches. SM2 supports many languages in content collection and four for sentiment analysis: English, Spanish, German, and Dutch. They have plans to add more in both cases.
Joe said that Alterian stores all of the conversations it collects to the tune of about 10 – 15 million a day. They now have over 3 billion stored conversations, likely many that you and I have had. They keep data storage in-house and are constantly expanding this capability. They now plan to move the SM2 infrastructure into their main Alterian data centers. There are three major ones around the world for better global coverage.
Future upgrades to SM2 include improving regional content collection at the many online communities that are growing outside the US. They provide new releases every two months with some significant new features slotted for 2010.
Having recently read the Forrester report, Text Analytics Takes Business Insight to New Depths, I asked Joe about the difference between SM2 which collects data, helps organize it and provides sentiment analysis and the text analytic tools that have a version of these same capabilities. Joe said that both have a role and Alterian partners with some of the tools mentioned in the Forrester report such as Clarabridge. A tool like SM2 that is focused on social media monitoring has more out-of-the-box reporting, can more easily look at issues like share of voice and key influencers, and respond back to what is discovered. A text analytic tool requires more manual work to address such issues.
I think that Alterian made a great move to acquire SM2 and they are taking good care of its continued development. They have expanded both the development teams and the customer services staff while retaining many of the original people. I look forward catching up again after their new feature set is released.
