For most businesses today, a significant portion of marketing and customer service involves monitoring and responding to conversations taking place on social media networks. The challenge is that social media analytics can be very expensive and time-consuming, without necessarily providing obvious or immediate payback.

SocialNuggets is doing something about that challenge.

The company, which specializes in social media analytics, offers a couple of different resources. First, they provide a portal, socialnuggets.net, which contains free access to a database of info-graphs (‘nuggets’) showing analysis of social media data relating to several consumer electronics verticals, and to the banking sector.

So far, most of the ‘nuggets’ available show information about smartphone and tablet computer trends.

Second, the SocialNuggets sells a software-as-a-service (SaaS (News - Alert)) package for companies wanting to do their own social media data analysis.

In a recent TMCnet video interview, SocialNuggets’ co-founder and CEO, R. Paul Singh, explained to TMC (News - Alert) CEO Rich Tehrani that while other providers offer listening/monitoring solutions, or analysis solutions, his company ties bother together with tools that make real sense out of social media data.

These tools enable companies in the consumer electronics vertical, for example, to compare consumer sentiment around battery life of the iPhone 4 versus the ITC Thunderbolt. This is done through real-time analysis of data, culled from a variety of sources.

“For the smartphone category, we analyze about a million public conversations each month,” Singh said during the video interview. “About sixty percent of that comes out of Twitter (News - Alert), five percent out of Facebook, and 30 percent from forums. Some of the conversations also come from blogs, review sites, and other place.”

For paying customers, this type of data is updated daily. Free nuggets on the portal are updated somewhat more infrequently.

Right now, SocialNuggets has four main target customer categories: customer service, product management (which includes R&D), marketing, and end users. One of its customers is the Consumer Electronics Association (News - Alert).

Analytics groups within businesses are also showing interest in SocialNuggets, because the tools provided offer contextual data formed from numeric data.

Signh said companies in verticals already served by SocialNuggets gain a special advantage: they can begin consuming data from Day 1. This means they can bypass the usual (expensive) process of spending money on monitoring tools, gathering data, and then spending more money on analysis solutions.

SocialNuggets plans to grow by adding more verticals to its knowledgebase, and to sell its full technology companies that want to do their own analysis.

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