There's a social networking revolution underway and your organization should be taking part.

That's easy advice to offer, but just how do you filter out the irrelevant junk on Facebook, Twitter, and various blogs and get down to the brand- and product-relevant questions, comments, compliments and complaints? How do understand the prevailing buzz amid the noise?

This was the topic explored at this week's InformationWeek 500 event in Dana Point, CA, during a discussion entitled "Get Close To Customers Faster Through Social Networks and Sentiment Analysis." I shared my own observations on advances in text-analytics technology while panelists Jared Anderson of retail giant Best Buy and Torsten Buhrke of Kia Motors America described their real-world applications and achievements with these technologies.

The upshot was that there's a growing list of important applications and departments to be served. It's time for IT to back the deployments and help take capabilities enterprisewide.

[ Want more on mining Facebook, Twitter, and other networks for brand-relevant insight? Read "Social Media Shapes Up As Next Analytic Frontier". ]

Text-analytics technologies and the sentiment-analysis applications they power can decipher the meaning behind the textual information in email, CRM comment fields, blog posts, and other unstructured data sources. These technologies have become the standard for automated analysis of customer research such as email-delivered customer-satisfaction surveys now routinely sent out by hotels, restaurants, and other customer-facing businesses.

The technologies are now being applied to social networks -- without them, there's no hope of keeping up with the sheer volume of comments. Best Buy has more than 4.6 million fans on Facebook alone, while Kia Motors meets more than 600,000 customers and would-be customers on Facebook.

Best Buy has been building out its text- and sentiment-analysis capabilities for more than four years. The early focus was on analyzing customer surveys and call-center comment fields. Clarabridge has provided the retail giant's text-analytics and sentiment-analysis capabilities from the start, said Anderson, senior manager of customer-experience research. As Best Buy broadened the scope of analysis to include many more public data sources, it tapped Cymfony as an aggregator of data from popular electronics-related blogs, media sites, forums and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Quantity is the key to yielding reliable data in unstructured-data analysis, Anderson said, so he advised attendees to point text analytics at as many sources as possible and to use the results to supplement conventional research and analytics. The consumer-insight unit segments customers based on social-media involvement, and sentiment-analysis provides insight on competitors. Merchant teams explore discussions about bleeding-edge products and new accessories to anticipate demand. Marketers measure the buzz generated by advertising campaigns and the effectiveness of celebrity endorsements and promotions.

Social-media analysis also powers customer service and support activities at Best Buy. The consumer relations team uses the technology to monitor the Best Buy Facebook page and company-maintained Internet forums. It also helps Best Buy's Twitter response team -- dubbed the "Twelp Force"-- spot consumer comments that demand follow up. Best Buy public relations staff use sentiment-analysis to spot public conversations related to corporate responsibility and local community relations.

Kia Motors is a more recent entrant into social-media analysis, having tapped WiseWindow, a software-as-a-service provider, last year. WiseWindow continuously aggregates comments from across blogs, media sites and social networks to feed more than a dozen industry-specific databases that are then analyzed by the vendor's Web-accessed Mass Opinion Business Intelligence (MOBI) service. WiseWindow says its automotive database, for example, captures industry-relevant comments on tens of thousands of Internet sources ranging from Facebook and Twitter to auto-enthusiast and industry-focused blogs and Web sites.