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Visible Technologies, a provider of social media monitoring, analytics and engagement software and services, announced its entrance into the SMB market with an offering dubbed VI-Litewhich is designed to give small and midsize businesses the ability to integrate social media insights into their existing digital strategy.
The company has also added amplified engagement features to its Visible Intelligence platform, including enhanced sentiment capabilitiescatering to the needs of enterprise customers such as Microsoft, FedEx and American Express. In addition, the company introduced V-IQ, a social performance dashboard that presents data and metrics from any Visible workspace in one view.
The engagement and language enhancements in the Visible Intelligence platform allow customers to make sense of sentiments expressed in an expanded number of languages while better managing conversations and interactions with customers. V-IQ capabilities help customers view social data from various sources in a single dashboard. The company said the expanded breadth of offerings now enables customers of any size to leverage the Visible Intelligence platform.
“We continue to push product innovation for enterprise customers who rely on the Visible Intelligence platform for listening, analyzing and engaging with consumers in the fast-paced social media market,” said Kelly Pennock, CEO of Visible Technologies. “With VI-Lite, we’ve leveled the playing field for small to medium-sized businesses by providing access to the same technology being used by large enterprises. A key to this is having a real-time understanding of what the market is saying and making better-informed decisions based on social data.”
Visible has also expanded its enterprise-class platform to include a social performance dashboard, combining intelligence from multiple data sources including CRM data, traditional media and Web analytics. Aggregating strategic business information with social data into a single dashboard, V-IQ provides a user-friendly, continuously refreshed snapshot of the business in a visual format.
A gap exists between attitudes toward social media and investment in social media, a study by the Software & Information Industry Association found. The report, “Marketing in Today’s Economy, the first SIIA publication to gather business-to-business sales and marketing tactics from industry executives, focused on their companies’ use of email, mobile marketing and social media to build their brands, gain leads and improve customer support.
About 90 percent of marketing executives surveyed use social media marketing, and three-quarters believe it has a positive impact on their business. At the same time, slightly more than half (54.5 percent) of respondents said their company’s marketing team spends less than 10 hours per week investing in social media. And further, 35 percent said they spend only one to five hours per week on social media marketing.
The survey looked at a range of issues, and found a number of other results that are illuminating for marketers. For example, 75 percent of respondents do not outsource any social media efforts, and nearly 60 percent of respondents said that less than 5 percent of their deals began through social network interactions. Privacy is the top ethical concern in today’s marketing world, according to survey results, and most marketers predict that the biggest trend in 2012 will be greater communication and quantification of value to customers.