Today there is a wide range of social media initiatives for business intelligence (BI) to support decision making. This Search Engine Watch guide offers best practice advice on the top 5 tools and measurable attributes of social business intelligence.
"1. Volume of Conversation and Share of Voice: Find and track a significant amount of content within online "conversations" that matter to you most. For benchmarking purposes, conversations are often segmented by subject matter (competitive/industry brands, products, services) and source (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, etc).
"2. Identification of Key Themes, Opinions and Trending Topics: The tag cloud is a basic representation of this. If the volume of data warrants, filtering conversations by theme and topic is a way to obtain deeper meaning and value.
"3. Sentiment Analysis: The main function is indexing the tone of conversations (positive, negative or neutral), with more sophisticated insights gained through content matched to varying degrees of sentiment (satisfied vs. very satisfied)."