by Angela Guess
Dion Hinchliffe recently enumerated nine strategic uses for social media in Big Data strategies. The first is expertise and reputation tracking: “Most organizations badly want to know if the information they see in their activity streams and social intranets is accurate and authoritative. Externally, they also want to be able to identify and keep tabs on influencers and experts. Social BI can be used to build and manage the large datasets needed to power apps that can provide these capabilities.”
Another strategic use of social media is monitoring customer engagement and retention: “While basic social analytics can provide a lot of raw data about what customers are doing in your social channels, understanding where key events are, what they mean, and how best to engage is where analytics turns into intelligence. Radian6 and IBM’s Coremetrics are two of a great many examples of capabilities in this space that are billed as analytics but also have social BI features.”
Companies can also use social media data for funnel analysis: “Sales has long been a reports and stats managed function, but as demand generation increasingly focuses on social channels for building the inbound funnel, social BI can build a clear and integrated picture of what the funnel looks like in real-time without painstaking and time-consuming manual data collection and analysis. Kontagent is an example of a leading provider in this space.”
