There were a few interesting analytics-related updates this week, starting with Salesforce’s new service.

The popular SaaS provider debuted Radian6 Insights, a tool that promises to analyze social media data and present it in such a way that can benefit an organization. Users can use it to identify things like customer demographics and reactions to merchandising changes, and there’s an entire market place dedicated to other metrics offered by third party devs. Salesforce aims to organize social data and visualize it for the business user, while one startup is doing the same from the opposite angle.

Then there’s Visual.ly, a startup that’s dedicated to visualizing data. It has a community of over 30,000 designers, analysts and other professionals that collaborate on infographics covering an extremely broad spectrum of industries, and now a number of additional social components have been added into the mix. Visual.ly now has an activity feed and a whole set of features that allow users to communicate whether or not they’re available for a project, or are looking to get an infographic done, within their circle.

Loggly in turn does something completely different with data. It takes the cloud approach to log management and displays information about an environment as a whole, rather than statics for individual components such as applications. The latter can prove to be a big hindering factor when managing large-scale environments, which is why Loggly’s relatively simple solution to the problem raised it $5.7 million in a Series B funding round led by True Ventures.

The final item comes from Datameer, which landed a partnership with Dell to help accomplish what Salesforce is trying to do with its newest service – make data simpler for the end user. The company’s software has been bundled up with Dell’s Cloudera-powered Hadoop appliance.