Social business consulting firm DachisGroup today announced its social media monitoring tool called Social Performance Monitor. It’s the firm’s first subscription service and another example of how service companies are expanding to productize services and own more intellectual property.

Social Performance Monitor is a compliment to the firm’s free Social Business Index service and is delivered as a software-as-a-service. It’s already in use by DachisGroup clients including Red Bull and Target. The tool will not just monitor brand mentions and sentiment analysis but also: correlate that sort of data with events like product announcements or mergers and acquisitions. Here’s a full list of features:

• Performance Insights: Metrics and underlying measures correlated to brand marketing business outcomes (starting with Brand Awareness, Brand Love, Mindshare, and Advocacy) for the specific geographic region, brand, and organization where the marketing initiatives occurred.
• Event Correlation Insights: Correlation between performance and external events (product launches, mergers, acquisitions, marketing campaigns, etc.) that may account for performance fluctuations to help isolate the contribution from social marketing efforts (vs. external forces).
• Content Insights: Correlation of performance to social marketing activities and behaviors to assist with attribution of specific actions to business benefits received.
• Conversation Insights: Analysis and evolution of long running conversation topics that result from behaviors and marketing activities to understand the attributes of the content or strategy that resonate with the engaged market and insight into how that content shapes the psychographics and opinions of the audience.
• Trend Insights: Trending insights to help understand relative performance over time vs. industry, competitive, and best in class performance.
• Benchmarking Insights: Provide region, subsidiary, department, and competitive benchmarking to help organizations zero in on where outsized increases and decreases in specific metrics and measures are originating.
• Insight Engine: An analytics engine that monitors all of the above for your brands, regions, departments, and subsidiaries to highlight the specific insights that need attention or action.

That’s quite a bit of data slicing and dicing, similar to what Salesforce.com’s Radian6 is doing. And at the last Dreamforce, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and other executives emphasized that the company is taking a more consultative role. In short, the lines between the tradional service provider and the software vendor are blurring.

I’ve looked before at the role of the data scientist. Data scientists bring unique skill sets and tend to have extensive education, which makes them hard to come by. The move by service providers towards building reusable software products makes sense within the context of a shortage of workers with the right skill set and understanding of big data. There’s a real value in being able to reuse solutions for multiple clients delivered as data-as-a-service, all without the need of the overhead of a “>complex clusters of data crunching servers and a fleet of physics Phds.

I’ve covered recently how other companies ranging from the small IT industry analyst firm RedMonk to the large IT services firm Tata are building and selling hosted services. We’ll be keeping an eye on the way this trend plays out.