Start-ups "make sense" of social media firehose
Jinfo Blog

By Jan Knight

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In my blog entry Social Analytics & Insights Offer Opportunity from last November, I cited an analyst’s thoughts on the emerging opportunities in Social Analytics and Social Insights.  I discussed the companies who were working to try and “make sense” of social media and the areas of “predictive analysis”. 

Now, a current Economist article, Sipping from the fire hose, discusses how a “torrent of microblogs can reveal changes in a nation’s mood”. Citing two companies, GNIP, a US firm in Colorado, and DataSift, a new start-up company from the UK, the article is evidence of the emergence of these type of “data platform” companies - those companies who are involved in the sale and analysis of real-time data from social media outlets. 

DataSift collects data from a number of diverse data sources (Twitter, Facebook, WordPress, etc.) and helps to filter and analyse them so that customers get just the information that is most valuable to them for their own needs.

GNIP, founded in 2008, is described as more of a wholesale distributor. Customers, like social media monitoring companies, can subscribe to feeds of Tweets for example containing certain keywords or weblinks.  

Both DataSift and GNIP have been funded by venture capital firms, possibly additional evidence that these emerging businesses are onto something. Jeremiah Owyang’s research into social media will continue to be a place to return now and then to keep up with emerging and suggesful technologies related to social media.

There are also additional companies such as Lexalytics, who, in addition, help to extract meaning and sentiment from messages and posts. All of these products and services, just like any other more traditional business intelligence, can be valuable for marketing purposes and business development among other things.

Tech Europe wrote about Web 3.0 and Big Data with the warning that any company who isn’t maximising its capacity to “collect, store and interrogate” its data stream isn’t going to really succeed. It seems that DataSift and GNIPwill help companies do just that.

Now, to look at the other side of the coin, sort of, Tim Buckley Owen also wrote just this week on the question of can money be made from social media and concluded that some other recent developments may make the world of online social interaction a bit more fragile than first thought.

I suppose the jury is still out and will be for a while and some of these companies will survive and others won’t. We’ll try to keep you posted.

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