This morning at 6 AM PST (way too early for me, but thankfully I was briefed before) Visible Technologies (client) announced the release of their new product. I worked with them on this project and you can stop reading now if you think this is a biased post.
It is not.
I always said that I chose my clients and projects based on what has similar views to what I hold. I am very passionate in my work, and passion cannot be faked — so I have to agree with the topic.
This is one of those cases.
If you ever asked me or hear me talk about Social Media Monitoring (SMM), I’ve been saying for some time that it is a commodity, soon to be extinct. There is very limited, if any value, today from its current inception. That has been proven by virtually every vendor building their own module for it in a short time, for little investment. There is some limited value to the remaining SMM tools in the market, but I don’t expect to say the same in 12 months or less — at least not for those are simply counting hits and reporting them in a dashboard. They need to grow and become something more, work on the data they collect and report more than a count or sentiment analysis on it (which is usually not very reliable anyways).
They need to create intelligence.
This is an opinion I shared with my clients, including of course more details of specific actions and features they can take to take their SMM to the next level. I shared this view with Visible at the very beginning of our relationship and they agreed.
They had been working on combining five different products under one common platform for some time now. If you knew them before, you knew them as a SMM (Social Media Monitoring) vendor – someone who competed with Radian6, ScoutLabs and Biz360 before the acquisitions, Crimson Hexagon, Alterian-Techrigy, Sysomos and few others. Alas, their power was never on the capturing of social media and counting of occurrences, that was just one part of it. The power of their combined solution is the analytics engine and the ability to generate intelligence from that analysis. Not simply reporting and dashboarding – actual intelligence on the information collected. The problem they had was it was spread across different products, not in a single location.
They now have brought all their products together in a single platform that can capture., analyze, generate intelligence, and integrate with CRM and other legacy systems. I saw how it works. I like the concept as it focuses more on the analytics not the technology . Visible Intelligence generates Social Intelligence (no, not that one — the other one… it is all in my white paper that you should read), real actionable intelligence from social channels. Some of their customers already have it working and the results have been spectacular and incredible. (their words). There is a very interesting case study in the white paper you should read as well. The white paper is downloadable from their web site, link is at the end of this post.
I won’t go on and on about it, you get the idea. It is a step in the right direction and I am looking forward to see what the market says about it, and the concept of Social Intelligence.
Check it out (video explaining their concept of Social Intelligence, and my white paper available in the main page).
Sounds great on paper, however, if you were to take a cold hard look at what’s happened at the Visible Technologies of late you might begin to wonder. In short Visible Technologies has lost the CIA business, their CEO and approximately 40 staff in the last 3-6 weeks. The majority of the lay-offs (amounting to one third of the workforce at Visible Technologies) are I believe developers so the Company may need to revise their release schedule and ability to innovate. There are, as always, going to be casualties in what is a very crowded market.