The SBI analyzes hundreds of millions of signals from tens of thousands of companies in real-time and is free to use.
The Social Business Index is a free service that measures how “social” a company is and how it compares to its industry and competitors. So far, 300 large companies have signed on as participants, including Facebook, Google, Nike, Walt Disney, and Coca-Cola.
The data used to put together the Index is made up of “company, employee, partner, vendor, customer, engaged market and influencer data, and derived from APIs and data obtained through purchases, partnerships, scraping, crowdsourcing and otherwise by its internal data team.” The data no-hands-ism involved? Natural language processing, machine learning, and clustering algorithms in near real-time. Plus, it’s lovely to behold.
Weaknesses? Today the scores are relative to one another but have no direct meaning and nothing to anchor them. 900 is better than 800, but is 900 good? Numbers crawl the page like a stock ticker but without context they feel arbitrary and meaningless. Plus the algorithms driving the score are a mystery. Without investing to go deeper with creator/publisher Dachis (there’s the hook), it’s hard for a company to understand how and where to remediate or invest. If I had to give it a grade, I’d give it a 5 (using my secret scoring formula).