Social Analytics in an Enterprise Context: From Manufacturing to Software Development

Although customers become more and more vocal in expressing their experiences, demands and needs in various social networks, companies of any size typically fail to effectively gain insights from such social data and to eventually catch the market realm. This paper introduces the Anlzer analytics engine that aims at leveraging the "social" data deluge to help companies in their quest for deeper understanding of their products' perceptions as well as of the emerging trends in order to early embed them into their product design phase. The proposed approach brings together polarity detection and trend analysis techniques as presented in the architecture and demonstrated through a simple walkthrough in the Anlzer solution. The Anlzer implementation is by design domain-independent and is being tested in the furniture domain at the moment, yet it brings significant added value to software design and development, as well, through its experimentation playground that may provide indirect feedback on future software features while monitoring the reactions to existing releases.