The Premier Business Leadership Series event in Singapore, a thought leadership conference, was used by SAS (News - Alert) as a platform to announce new features for SAS Social Media Analytics.

More than 600 senior-level attendees from the public and private sectors shared ideas on critical business issues and were introduced to SAS' new concept of social scorecards, the author hub and new competitive intelligence functionality.

According to Jonathan Moran, Global Product Marketing Manager, SAS, merely monitoring online conversation was insufficient. The greater issue of understanding customer sentiment, interacting with them and leveraging information from such interaction was essential to deliver value back to customers.

The new features introduced by SAS appear to a great extent to be in tune with Moran's expectations as

they provided departments across the enterprise with the ability to understand, predict and act based on social data.

While the Social scorecards paints a picture of overall performance across social channels and help to evaluate how effective online and social programs really are, the author hub focuses on providing insights into various aspects of online authors and the competitive intelligence functionality helps to shape future strategies by allowing insights into how key competitors are perceived from a social perspective.

Moran believed that the new features were more relevant to business and said in a statement, “With the ability to categorize data and apply sentiment at such a granular level, SAS gives companies the most complete understanding on how customers feel about all aspects of the business, plus the ability to recognize how online conversations affect business results.”

On the back end, the addition of industry sentiment engines for six new industries enable companies to quickly deploy SAS Social Media Analytics in a more relevant and meaningful manner.

In related news, SAS Social Media Analytics demonstrated the new solution in Booth 21 at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, May 3-7 2010.

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