From posterous photos of Opening Session to the New York Times Bits Blog, the first blog posts about SAS Global Forum are starting to show up online.

Writing on the Bits Blog, Steve Lohr says:

Analysts who have looked at the new offering – and tried it out – are impressed by the accuracy of its automated sentiment analysis. Until now, they say, software alone has not come near the caliber of “human readers” (a person reading through thousands of tweets related to a given company and rating each as positive or negative).

Katie Paine, who's quoted in the NY Times blog also posted on her blog about her excitement for the new social media analytics solution:

So why am I so excited about this particular solution. SAS SMA offers all the standard features of social media monitoring platform with several important points of differentiation:

1. It’s integration of traditional and social media and web analytics into one seamless application. So now when someone says "did adding Facebook toour launch mix work? We can now say yes, not only did it impact the pickup of our key messages, but it also increased web traffic by 22%.
2. It’s accuracy level -- over 90% is better than most humans can do, and orders of magnitude over anything I've seen in the industry.
3. It’s ability to deliver “phrase clouds” as opposed to word clouds which are much more useful when trying to analyze a marketplace.
4. The potential to integrate the data with business analytics that SAS is known for like CRM and Marketing Mix Modeling.

Philip Sheldrake watched the product launch via live Webcast, posted this on his marcom professional blog:

Now I should caveat this conclusion with the simple fact that I have yet to get my mits on the service, but given SAS' heritage products and services and the brief demonstration during the webcast of their SMA's integration with Web analytics, it looks to me like the social Web analytics field changed today.

Other topics being blogged about at SAS Global Forum include customer support and the SAS culture. Denis Pombriant of the Beagle Research Group says this in his blog post,

Wisdom of Crowds, Chatter and SAS:

I don’t know what SAS’s prime directive is but I know that every employee does. You can see it in their eyes and hear it in their conversations and it is definitely pro customer. What makes SAS such a gem is that it is privately held and unlike many private companies this one has revenues north of $2.3 billion and it reinvests more than 20 percent in its products and services. And it appears to me that founder and CEO, Dr. Goodnight, has a prime directive that encompasses customers and employees that I assume goes like this: treat employees well and they’ll treat customers well. It’s a strategy that has worked well for more than 34 years.

Also, there's a lot of good posts on the SAS blogs, especially the SAS Global Forum blog. Keep checking there all day for the next few days, and watch for posts from Dave Thomas, Chris Hemedinger and others on their blogs.