Alterian SM2 keeps getting better

Aaron Newman: VP Product Marketing, Alterian and SM2 creator

SM2 has evolved a whole bunch in the last nine months since the acquisition. The dashboard is one of the most exciting things that we've been working on.

Now that we have that dashboard there's nothing you can't do better now in SM2, so it's really a great way to take our user interface experience to the next level. The user interface now has such simplicity, it has the nice Silverlight aspects of it that really make it very rich and easy to use.

We have over 9 billion pieces of content in our warehouse that you can access instantly from SM2. Nobody else has that richness of data. Even around that data we have things like language, location, gender, age-- we have so much metadata that gives you more than just a mention, but tells you who this person is, where they are, what they're saying, richness of sentiment, analysis.

So often with other products you scratch the surface and you realize there's not allow below it. You can't drill down through it, you can't see what the results actually represent. SM2 is very transparent. It allows you to see exactly why something was marked as positive or negative, why it's marked as a certain location.

It's the strongest in terms of real analytics. So if you're just looking for pretty charts and graphs in the past you might have been able to go another way. But if you really wanted the rich meat and potatoes, you wanted something that was really deep in analytics we had the best capabilities to do that. Well now even with the dashboard we also have that rich GUI as well that really makes it even more attractive.

One of our biggest strength is we're not just a social media monitoring tool and one of the changes we're going to see is that social media has to play into the other spaces. We have a total integrated marketing platform. We have everything from content management to web analytics, to database analytics and social media is a piece of that.

So for bigger companies that need that to fit into their whole marketing organization it's just clearly you want to have something that's already integrated into those other pieces

That's a real big advantage as well as the depths of the analytics.