It’s not that often that I’m right (and probably much more often that I’m wrong!), but there are several things that Telligent called before the market that I don’t hesitate to see us take credit for:
- Before there was “Social [Networking | Media]” we had a vision for building a community platform that integrated in a suite of tools. This is what became Community Server, our main product.
- Nearly 2 years ago we started investing in tools to help measure activity. This became Harvest.
This morning someone forwarded me a paper that Peter Kim published, Social Media Predictions for 2009. One of the macro points at the end was, “Measurement needs to be addressed, soon“.
I couldn’t agree more!
We’ve been working on this problem for nearly 2 years now and it is why we hired Marc Smith, whose doctorate is in sociology, to help us think through this problem even more. Version 3.0 of Harvest is due out in early 2009 and will help answer questions about usage that usually required traditional web analytics tools tying them back into the social analytics. In fact, you can see some of the roadmap details here:
http://telligent.com/products/road-map/road-map-overview/
So yes, Measuring Social Media is going to be a critical success factor for 2009 (and beyond). …and Telligent has been there from the beginning.
BTW, you can watch a quick video overview of Harvest on YouTube here:
