Social network developer Yammer has announced the addition of an analytics dashboard that the company is promoting as bringing big data insights into the social sphere. But is providing the bare minimum of information that users have come to expect from, say, Google Analytics really “big data?” It doesn’t really seem like it.

“By giving our customers access to powerful analytics, we are helping them better understand their networks, revealing potential for growth and demonstrating how Yammer can transform their organizations,” said Yammer CEO David Sacks in the press release.

In nuts-and-bolts terms, the analytics dashboard gives administrators access to metrics on engaged members, messages, top performing groups and a breakdown of how users are accessing your social network (mobile, web, et cetera). It can provide reports on “members, groups, files and Pages” for 7- and 28-day periods.

The example Yammer provides in the press release is the ability for a community manager to track the impact of a training session. Yammer promises that in future releases, customers will have access to “separate sections with more detailed statistics and analysis about network members, messages, Pages, groups and files.”

The Yammer Analytics Dashboard begins rolling out to premium customers today, and every paying user should have it by March 31st, 2012. Recently, Yammer closed an $85 million round of funding to expand its sales and marketing efforts.

Services Angle

This announcement raises a disturbing possibility: Is “big data” destined to go from hot topic to meaningless buzzword? After all, competitor Salesforce.com Chatter has offered Chatter Analytics since the Winter ’11 release, and Socialcast builds analytics directly into its social platform. And both have done it without invoking the admittedly hot topic of big data.

When I think of “big data,” I think of startups like Drawn to Scale, which recently raised the better part of a million dollars in seed funding for an Apache Hadoop-based distributed database designed to crunch terabytes, if not petabytes, of data. This infographic may be almost a year out of date, but it does a good job laying out the kind of scale we normally talk about when it comes to big data.

So you may understand why what sounds like a relatively lightweight analytics dashboard that doesn’t provide any functionality that Google Analytics hasn’t already offered customers since 2005 – pages viewed, time spent on pages, and so on. In other words, good on Yammer for developing its platform, but it’s a shame that it felt the need to dress this new feature up as something it’s not.

The lesson here: Not everything with a big data label is big data. As ever, pay less attention to the feature sheet and more about how the product in question might add value.