Mediaboss Marketing

Social media marketing isbig business. In addition to the intangible value offered by earned and owned media, advertising revenue across social networks worldwide amounted to $25.14 billion in 2015 and is projected to grow to $41 billion this year.

But bringing everything together into one social media management has always been a challenge.

Today Sysomos has announcedthe Sysomos Platform, which combines its full suite of social marketing and analytics capabilities, along with artificial intelligence to help marketers make the right moves.

The new platform unifies the companys tools for search, discovery, listening, publishing, engagement, and analysis. Using AI, it lets marketers take action in real time and measure the effect of those actions in a single user interface. Think of it as a social cloud, if you will. The platform also offers role-based customization so that users can design an experience to match their needs.

So what is Sysomos proposing to do with AI that isnt already handled by regular analytics and statistics?

SysomosAI uses intelligence toproactively deliver actionable insights, Peter Heffring, CEO of Sysomos, told VentureBeat. Instead of marketerscreating rules tofind what they want and get results, SysomosAI willspot any anomaly, affinity, or association in the data, but then put in the proper context for the marketer.

Thats important because it helps the marketer or social media managerseemessages and interactions they might otherwise miss. And thats just the beginning for Sysomos as it looks to enhance the platform further with additional AI capabilities.

In the future, ourAI will integrate and processmultiple data sources beyond social and campaign data and use that to help identify cause-and-effect relationships that deliver automated actions based on a companys business objectives, Heffring said.

Ive seen the application at work. In addition to using AI to identify engagements, it has image recognition that can help you determine secondary trends. For example, it might be that users are generating content that includes fashion, which theyre pairing with photos of your products or services. That helps you to identify affinitiesand assists with future campaigns.

The system isnt perfect yet, like most image identification technologies Ive seen. So how does Sysomos deal with the currently inevitable identification issues?

This is Sysomosproprietary technology, and weconstantly tune the model, Heffring said. When we have a specific request from a client, such as to focus on cars or shoes, we will train [the system] with more objects, and more varieties of those objects. For logo recognition, we are typically able to achieve an accuracy of up to 85 percent. For object recognition, depending on the object, accuracy typically is in the 60-80 percent range. The accuracy can be improved through further training by boxing or masking the objects to pinpoint whats being detected.

While the AI is helping at the moment, and the companys plans sound appealing, Heffring doesnt believe that AI will completely take over, at least not yet. After all, that would somewhat negate the social in social media.

Marketers will always want humans involved, but for many of the common product, brand, and service questions, AI will take over thoseresponses, Heffring said. However, there will be limits in the near term. When acustomer is expressing emotions and speaking in nuanced language like through emoji, GIFs, and similar media AI wont cut itright now. That will change, though,as automated responses from marketers will soon be able to pass the Turing test.

And AI has benefits beyondwhat the companys customers see.

AI also willbe invaluable to aggregateinsights from human interactions to funnel back to product development, customer service, marketing, and other departments, Heffring said.

Ultimately, the combination of a unified platform for social media management, along with AI-powered advice and analytics, can helpbusinesses interact at scale without losing the human touch.

As AI takes over, these corporate interactions wont be social in any meaningful respect, and thatsfine, Heffring said. Social media has always been about people interacting with each other. Consumers wont care how automated the interactions from businesses are, as long as those interactions address consumers needs.

The Sysomos Platform is available from today.

Read more:
Sysomos launches its new AI-powered social marketing platform ... - VentureBeat