Content area
Full text
Introduction
The onset of social media technologies has fundamentally changed the way people communicate and network with other people. Because of these technologies, information flows instantaneously between friends, family, and businesses via numerous devices.
The popularity of these social media platforms is such that Facebook has 1 billion active users (as of October 2012)'; the average number of tweets people send per day is about 340 million (as of March 2012)2; and 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.3
Although much of this content relates to noncommercial topics, an explosion of business-to-consumer and consumer-to-business interactions via social channels has changed consumer behavior and their expectations about how they interact and transact with businesses.
Social networking channels contain vast amounts of consumer behavior information. Much of this social media activity can be tied back to individuals to create highly valuable customer profiles. Leveraging social media data to create more complete customer profiles is critical to effective marketing. Enterprises that understand their customers and engage with them on their terms - when and where they want - will be at a significant competitive advantage.
The Benefits
Recognizing the value of these sources of social data and leveraging them appropriately is a relatively new challenge for many organizations. Social intelligence is a discipline that combines social media data with traditional customer data sources to yield deep insights that drive better marketing and overall business decisions. The benefits of using social intelligence include:
* Enhancing visibility and understanding of customers for better insight and foresight to develop customer advocacy
* Proactively protecting and enhancing brand reputation by monitoring and managing market sentiments, perceptions, and trends
* Spurring product or service innovation by leveraging market insights gained by listening, analyzing, and engaging with customers through social media
The Challenge
Although many benefits come with leveraging social intelligence, social media data can also bring challenges:
* It is big: It is much larger in scale than traditional customer information
* It is different: It consists of unstructured data that doesn't fit into typical data warehouse structures
* It is out of the enterprise's control: The data is created by people who are not affiliated with the enterprise, and the data resides on external domains such as Facebook...