In a move to improve their social analytics capabilities, Microsoft has acquired Netbreeze, a company we have highlighted in the past. Bob Stutz of Microsoft reports, “If you have a brand to protect, a product or a service to sell, then you cannot afford to overlook the wealth of information that is now available to you via social media… That’s why, fast on the heels of our MarketingPilot announcement, I am happy to share the news with you about another acquisition—this time in the social listening and analytics space.  When Microsoft considers an acquisition, we look for leading edge technology companies with innovative IP that aligns with our technology and can scale for the enterprise; this is what we were fortunate enough to find with Netbreeze.  A dynamic Swiss company started by some incredibly talented analytics scientists that we enthusiastically welcome to the Microsoft family.” Read more

Attensity, the leading provider of enterprise social analytics and engagement applications, today announced the release of Attensity Respond 6.0, a new release of Attensity’s Respond application designed to address the specific challenges facing the next generation of multi-channel social customer contact centers and marketers in large corporate environments.

Respond 6.0 provides a unified customer listening post where customer requests in social media as well as in emails, and other channels are automatically -and intelligently- analyzed, classified and routed to appropriate departments for response. Read more

A new article explores the potential of semantic analysis to find greater meaning in social analytics. According to the article, “A good many influence determination tools (e.g., Klout, LinkedIn’s InMaps social graph) look at influence in terms of interaction patterns between people and their individual social networks, or networks of friends and followers. These tools look at the dynamics of the interaction primarily rather than content.” Read more