The meaning of the matter

Autonomy Interwoven has introduced Social Media Analysis, a new offering said to allow businesses to convert the dynamic conversations taking place on social networks into actionable business opportunities. Autonomy Interwoven's Web content management solution employs Autonomy's Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL) to exploit the full value of social media. Autonomy says Social Media Analysis automatically listens to social media content, analyzes the dialogue to understand sentiment and enables marketers to instantly act on the insights to protect their brand and drive revenue growth.

The company says traditional keyword spotting solutions fail to truly understand the rich meaning and conceptual patterns within user-generated content. The challenge of understanding this type of information is more pronounced, because the language is more conversational, rife with familiar expressions, slang and varying emotional undertones (e.g. sarcasm, excitement, disappointment), and stated so briefly that context is difficult to discern.

Autonomy's IDOL provides proven clustering, pattern matching techniques and probabilistic modeling that treat words as symbols of meaning rather than simple data points, yielding a much richer and contextual set of data for marketers to act upon. Additionally, Autonomy Interwoven's Web content management (WCM) solution provides powerful capabilities for engaging customers in a dialogue and enables marketers to instantly act upon the meaning and insights gathered by IDOL, to deliver compelling, targeted offers to consumers on the Web.

Autonomy Interwoven Social Media Analysis includes an extensive set of intelligent connectors into social networks, enabling a single point of search for all user-generated content, saving organizations time and money. Social media connectors include CNET Reviews, Epicurious, Facebook, IMDb, Kbb.com, LinkedIn, RSS, TripAdvisor, Twitter, WebMD, Yahoo Finance and Yelp. Additionally, says Autonomy, IDOL provides connectors to literally any form of information and any channel—including call center, audio, customer relationship management systems, and traditional media and video to arm marketers with an even more comprehensive and holistic view of the customer.

IDOL analyzes the information from these sources to automatically form clusters of sentiment, both positive and negative, which marketers can use to identify meaningful trends upon which they can act.