The power of social media as an opinion former and influencer is beyond dispute but corporates have yet to capitalize on those opinions in the context of business intelligence. The impact of social media in business to date has largely been around recruitment and set piece strategies on Facebook which leverage product launches and build brand loyalty. Yet among the commentaries, blogs and Face-Walls lies valuable information concerning opinion about products, businesses, their strategies and initiatives, says Gary Simon, FSN’s managing editor.
In fact the information – whether it is factually correct or ill-informed could provide business insights that it would be near impossible to glean elsewhere – especially in real time. So the idea that we can trawl the internet and derive business value from all of this unstructured information is a fascinating one, with profound implications for performance management, strategy setting and privacy laws!
Consumers often use social media as part of their everyday decision making processes. Take for example the purchase of a book from Amazon, the decision to purchase a car or the choice of holiday destination. Many look at customer reviews on Amazon, an AA report on a car or countless bulletin boards and sites that discuss the merits and disadvantages of holiday resorts and hotels before making a decision. Yet how many organizations leverage information in social media sites as part of their normal business decision making?
Organizations spend vast sums of money through public relations, sponsorship and marketing to influence how their products and services are positioned in the minds of consumers but how much attention do they pay to the way that the brand is actually perceived? Listening to the customer’s needs is perhaps the foremost rule of business but in the multi-national, multi-channel environment in which most businesses operate, few can claim to have a handle on precisely what the market is saying about them and even fewer can assess the market in real time.
Social media is an expression of that sentiment and is growing at an astonishing rate. Tweets, blogs and Facebook account for mountains of information (Tweets are estimated to be in the region of 100 million per day) but discovering the “nuggets” of information buried in the detail is the challenge. In principle it is not a new challenge, after all business intelligence aficionados have been trying to make sense of large volumes of data for decades – with mixed success. But social media presents fresh difficulties. Firstly the data volumes are unimaginably big and secondly the data is unstructured. So the key issue is how does an organization combine large volumes of unstructured information with, say, structured financial data in a meaningful way and how can one turn that quickly to business advantage? This is the stuff of Social Intelligence (SI).
SAP BusinessObjects declared its foray into this embryonic field when it announced release 4.0 of its Business Intelligence and Enterprise Information Management Suite last week. SAP has been quick to realize the potential of social intelligence in a business setting and of course Business Objects has a deep heritage in business intelligence. The ability to handle unstructured text emanates from SAP’s acquisition of a company called Inxight in 2007. It is this text analysis technology that has been built into release 4.0.
Byron Banks, Vice President, Enterprise Information Management, SAP, told FSN, “Traditional business intelligence offerings focus on accessing, analyzing, and sharing information almost exclusively from structured sources such as operational systems and data warehouses. While this information is very useful in helping companies improve performance, it represents only a small fraction of the available data within an organization. Structured data doesn’t provide a view into the human side of information – the unstructured thoughts, feelings, and emotions of customers, partners, and employees that are typically captured in unstructured formats.”
So Release 4.0 is designed to support the analysis and understanding of relationships, trends, timelines, and patterns in data (blogs, facebook, websites and emails) that would otherwise go unnoticed.
But another vendor comes at it from a different direction. Visible Technologies specializes in the provision of social media solutions and its flagship product Visible Intelligence is a social media monitoring solution designed to cope with the huge volumes of social media on the internet. Visible Intelligence makes use of configurable dashboards, reporting and analytics in a way that will be familiar to users of business intelligence tools, but what it measures is what is profoundly different. For example, when it comes to social media, says the company, it’s crucial to know who matters and why. Influences are very important and can provide ‘message mileage’ and credibility that you just can’t pay for. So how is influence defined? Visual Technologies views influence as the measured global influence of individuals in social media so it looks at the ability of an author to incite behaviors in their peers within the social web. They measure this on active, measurable actions that reflect the author’s presence, interactive audience, their own participation in the community and the influence on the site through which they are posting.
The Visible Intelligence dashboard shows user defined metrics for social media
They also measure “sentiment”, leveraging one of the world’s largest databases of manually scored social media content. It’s just not how people feel or talk. To provide a more nuanced view of what people are actually saying, Visible Intelligence provides for and automatically scores all content in the system for four different types of sentiment — positive, negative, mixed, and neutral. A mixed score means that the author expressed both positive and negative sentiment in the post and can be a fast way to drill in to consumer conversations about product where they are positive about a brand overall but something is holding them back from buying such as the price, a missing feature or perhaps an untrue rumor started by a competitor.
But it is the combination of financial and non-financial information that is likely to yield the most interesting business insights. For example, can a regional fall in sales volume be correlated with negative blog posts about a product? Is sluggish growth in sales of a specific product associated with poor quality control or simply limited brand awareness and an inability to influence social media coverage on the right blogs, Facebook pages and discussion forums?
Craig Gordon, managing director of Visible Technologies EMEA told FSN, “We are seeing interest in linking CRM systems to social media using Twitter handles. In this way it is possible from the CRM system to see what a customer is saying about your products. And SAP itself employed us to use social intelligence monitoring to assess the success of its Sapphire campaign.”
But the opportunities for merging business and social media applications are only just beginning and Gordon believes there is a lot to come.
It is this fusion of hard financial data with sentiment, perceptions and opinions that provides the most exciting potential for business intelligence for years. It is one that is familiar to advertising agencies but the journey has only just commenced for business performance management.
