WHAT: A tool built on the Dachis Group's big-data analytics platform that scores and ranks large companies' social media presence. The data comes from the company, its employees, partners, vendors, customers and influencers as well as through various APIs, data buys and partnerships, scraping, crowdsourcing company contributions and the SBI team.

Companies are ranked in relation to the performance and social engagement of other companies in their markets. Companies not listed on the SBI can opt-in for free and receive the SBI analytic data.

Employees of any company listed on the index can register and gain free access to their company's profile where they can see their social presence and follow benchmarks for their industry to see how their company stacks up.

Right now, Google is the top-ranked company overall, followed by Facebook, News Corp., Time Warner, and Wal-Mart.

LAUNCHERS: Jeff Dachis, CEO, co-founded Razorfish. Erik Huddleston, CTO, formerly the CTO of Inovis and BetweenMarkets, Inc.

WHY: Companies have sophisticated SaaS programs to track and manage their social presence, but they don't have an easy way to compare their performance to others in their market. Companies don't know how their social media activity is correlated with business outcomes and relative performance.

WHEN/WHERE: September 2011 / Austin.

BACKSTORY: The Dachis Group built the Social Business Intelligence to find ways to accurately analyze and interpret market signals. The Social Business Index is the first product in a line that will include more paid tools for businesses to understand and maximize their social presence.

BUSINESS MODEL: SBI is free, but the Dachis Group plans on releasing paid products that provide deeper insights from the Social Business Intelligence Platform.

COMPETITION: Adobe SocialAnalytics, Altimeter.

CUSTOMERS/GROWTH: 26K+ companies are listed on the index, and Dachis Group is constantly adding more.

ON OTHER FORMS OF MEASURING SOCIAL PRESENCE: "You can have survey data, you'll see a lot of consulting agencies or firms that will sit around a table and vote who are the most social companies in the world," Erik tells LAUNCH. "We have taken a completely different attack, ours is all analytic based. We use language processing on conversations taking place on social, we use machine-learning algorithms to determine performance and we use clustering algorithms to determine best in class worst in class behaviors and activities."

ON HOW SBI IS DIFFERENT FROM KLOUT: "It's not Klout -- although I love Klout -- what we are measuring from an influencer standpoint is not your general influence, we are not talking about like Guy Kawasaki who is universally influential," explains Erik. "We are talking about influential for your brand. We measure influence on a brand-by-brand basis, company-to-company. Guy Kawasaki is irrelevant in pharmaceuticals. But a set of eloquent and well connected pharma-scientists that are engaged with your brand and in conversation with people in your market. We look at their interest graph to your brand and then we look at their influence on your engaged market."

INVESTORS: Not disclosed.

RAISED: $30M Series B funding.

EMPLOYEES: About 50 on-site with more than 300 freelancers.

SCREEN SHOTS

You don't have to register to see basic information about any company, including its overall ranking in the top left, how its rank has changed in the past week and its overall score.

Every company in the index has a chart showing the different players (circles) in that company's social media presence and how those players are related (lines).

The larger the circle, the more important the player and the more influential and engaged are the individuals within it. Thicker lines mean stronger conversations between those players -- conversations are measured by volume, depth, frequency and consistency.

On the X-axis, conversations that are open are on the left, those that are more inward focused are on the right.

On the Y-axis, conversations that are more diverse are lower while more cohesive conversations are higher.

Once you have registered on the SBI you can see more information about your company. This graph, not publicly available, shows a series of competitors in the computer hardware space. Again, the size of the circle shows the importance of that player and the engagement and influence of those within it. The selected circle turns orange and also pulls up a box showing its current and previous week score.

FURTHER READING

1. The Problem with Social Media Monitoring Tools (Ignite Social Media, June 21, 2011)

2. Hiring Demand For Social Media Skills Still on the Rise (San Francisco Chronicle, September 20, 2011)

CONTACTS & LINKS

Social Business Index
Website: http://www.socialbusinessindex.com/
Twitter: @SocBizIdx

Dachis Group
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/dachisgroup
Twitter: @dachisgroup
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/company/dachis-group

Jeff Dachis
Twitter: @jeffdachis
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreydachis

Erik Huddleston
Email: Erik dot Huddleston at dachisgroup dot com
Twitter: @ehuddleston

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