Can Social Media be the next big lever for Business Intelligence?
Social media has proliferated at an electric speed and social media platforms have touched millions across the world. More than 8% of the world population is now on Facebook and more than 40 million tweets are made every day on Twitter. Consequentially, social media has made internet a much more collaborative place and the amount of data available on the web space has increased exponentially.
Amidst all these happenings, some folks are sensing a giant value creation opportunity. This opportunity is created on two accounts. One, due to the sheer volume of content getting generated on social media platforms. And, second, potential that this data holds for getting transformed into business critical insights. So, do social media look like being the next big lever for business intelligence? Well, many would say a resounding YES!
Now, based on this background, I will try to touch upon three basic questions:
- How can transformation of social media data create value for organizations?
- What differentiates social media data from other sources of data?
- How can Social Media data be transformed into actionable insights?
How can transformation of social media data create value for organizations?
Understanding a customer's mind is one thing that has been at the top of the agenda for marketers around the world. Social media data coming in form of twitter tweets, Facebook comments, discussion forum reviews etc is a rich source of data pointing to people's perceptions, reactions, sentiments, and feedback about organizations and their products. This can provide organizations a peep into their customers' minds thus giving them a chance to understand and serve them better. Eventually better customer understanding and service will lead to better customer acquisition and retention. Superior revenues and ROIs will be a logical consequence.
What differentiates social media data from other sources of data?
Social Media data is probably superior to other data sources in more ways than one. This data is enormous yet inexpensive. This data comes in real time from real people. And finally, I believe this data is perhaps the most authentic reflection of a customer's mind since it comes out voluntarily. Nobody is forced to write a product review, it's always voluntary. Neither are comments on a product's page on Facebook or Twitter out of compulsion. These factors overcome the limitations of traditional data collection methods like questionnaires and interviews which suffered from drawbacks of reach, cost and receptivity.
How can Social Media data be transformed into actionable insights?
Understandably, sophisticated tools are required to carry out this transformation. To start with, any social media intelligence tool gathers all the relevant information from various social media platforms. Owing to the noisy nature of this space, hunting for relevant information is a challenge for all such tools. The next step would be to organize the data into different buckets based on geography, demography, time etc. Techniques like textual analytics are then used to comprehend each segment and thus gain valuable and timely insights about people's reactions, brand reputations, latest market buzz, key influencers, opinion leaders and so on.
In part 2 of this blog, I will touch upon some of the challenges that exist in transformation of social media data, some prominent social media intelligence tools in the market and finally a few case studies where analysis of social media data have benefitted the organizations.
- Karan Chadha
Karan Chadha is an Associate Consultant at Infosys. He is a part of Business Intelligence practice and specializes in OBIEE. His interests lie in consulting and pre-sales activities across the practice.
Comments
Author touches upon a very interesting topic in this post. Salient role played by analysis of social network contents in understanding customer behavior is now acknowledged by business analysts and consultants worldwide. While the richness of the social media data and its potential in value creation for organizations can't be overemphasized, the third question raised by the author is most pertinent. The biggest challenge in transforming social network information into actionable insights was the unstructured nature of the data. But the emergence of content mining platforms and tools has resulted in capabilities which enable enterprises to analyze the unstructured data alongside traditional structured data more effectively and efficiently. Also organizations now increasingly appreciate the fact that structured and unstructured data can't be analyzed in silos and a more holistic approach is needed to facilitate improved decision making. This evolution of unstructured analytics has provided a huge fillip to commercial adaptation of social media data and in my opinion, the answer to the question raised by author in the title of this post is a definite 'yes'.
Looking forward to the next post by the author on this topic...
Posted by: Ashish Deshmukh | October 28, 2010 12:06 PM
Thanks for your comment Ashish. You have rightly pointed out that the third question is the most pertinent. The success achieved by the current media intelligence tools available in the market has been nothing more than moderate. Also, their accuracy in correctly deciphering the textual data has not been more than 60%. So, a long way to go before we could actually have robust and effective social media intelligence tools in the market. I will delve deeper into this aspect in part 2 of this blog.
Posted by: Karan Chadha | November 1, 2010 5:48 AM
8% of the world on Facebook - the opportunity is mouth-watering. Nice to note that the author has bingoed on the 3 key HOWs 1) How SMedia creates value 2) How it is different and 3) How data can be transformed to make it useful ... Looking forward to more insights on this promising area
Posted by: Vijayaraghavan V | December 23, 2010 11:44 AM
Thanks for your comment Vijayraghavan. The opportunity is indeed mouth watering and it is high time that major vendors like Oracle and SAP should develop solutions to capitalize on it. You can read the second part of this blog here:
http://www.infosysblogs.com/oracle/2010/12/can_social_media_be_the_next_b_2.html#more
Posted by: Karan Chadha | January 1, 2011 4:35 PM