Fried Logic

2:05 pm on April 22, 2010 by Sarah Findle

SAS Shows Off its New Toy

I was fortunate enough to attend the SAS Social Media Analytics Software Launch event (#sassma) last night with a group of about 50 Triangle area social media experts and enthusiasts.  The turn out was a great mix and after some mingling, good food and cold drinks the event was underway.

David Thomas, social media manager at SAS, noted lessons learned from the software launch. It was interesting to see the difference just one year makes in the amount of social media engagement surrounding an event.

In 2009 the SAS Global Forum hashtag (#sgf09) received 500 tweets from 25 unique users (including SAS employees).  In 2010 the number skyrocketed to 3,353 tweets using the hashtag (#sgf10) with 836 unique users (not including SAS employees).

A lot of this audience participation came from the company’s focus on the customer that will use the product and not the company that created it.  They invited influential bloggers and professionals to their product launch and fielded questions live, while also answering questions straight from Twitter, so the “average joe” could get in his two cents too.  I like big people/companies who remember the little people (aka those who make the big guys, big!).

Assigning “Twitter Captains” was another innovative idea implemented for the launch.  Since the developers and main spokespeople for the software were a bit tied during the launch itself, the SAS team assigned several employees who were off site to serve as “Twitter Captains”.  They were kept in the loop about timing of announcements and specific details about the product so that they could field questions that may come up on Twitter during the actual launch.  A great idea to keep conversation real time, but break up the responsibility among people.

It also shows SAS’s other emphasis on not isolating the project but making sure all teams, departments and employees were well aware of what was going on.  When someone looks at a company from the outside they don’t see individual departments and infrastructure, they see one corporate brand – so you need that brand as a whole to be on the same page.

“Shut up and Show it” – quoting the intro slide to the demo:

The spotlight was turned over to Andy Bober, director of customer intelligence product management at SAS, who brought to the center ring (aka the projector) the wild and wonderful software demo. The interface itself isn’t so exotic looking but it is functional, and gets the job done. To name some notable features:

• Media Sentiment Over Time: Not only does it measure brand sentiment from the past but also predicts future sentiment trends. Good forecaster, but like the

• Influencers: It broke down influencers into professional and consumer categories so that if you are looking for consumer influencers they don’t get lost among the corporate powerhouses.

• Phrase Cloud: Like a word cloud, the phrase cloud makes a visualization of the most commonly used phrases.  A single keyword sometimes doesn’t cut it – a phrase can further narrow down data aggregation.

• Media Analysis Workbench: The word ‘wicked’ was used as an example. Wicked in 99% of the world has a negative connotation, but if you happen to claim New England as your home it certainly means something “wicked” good.  The media analysis workbench lets you go in and override words and phrases that are misunderstood by the software.

The Q&A session brought about some great conversation.

“What does it mean for the little guys?” Like any new tech toy the software will get less expensive as it evolves.  Currently it is geared toward larger enterprise businesses and evolves a lot of back-end work on the part of the SAS team (it also costs an arm and a leg). Eventually SAS plans to offer a version of the software to agencies and smaller businesses.

Not surprisingly people are already asking, “Where is this? Where is that?” expecting everything to be perfect right out of the starting gate.  But like all good products the software will surely evolve based on user feedback and improved technology.

So, for those medium-sized agencies and companies out there, let the enterprise businesses be the guinea pigs for now – good things come to those who wait!