Business Intelligence for Social Media

If you are an enterprise and you have not yet have figured out what to analyze from Social media then here is something that you need to look at. Taking the Social Media route for an enterprise has to have its set of goals, any investment certainly has to have a prerequisite over how and what ROI they need. Here in the case of Social Media implementations; the industry at large is still coping with newer definitions and newer trends, hence the entire stack of Social Media is still evolving. When it comes to enterprises we have seen in the earlier article on how we go about structuring an scenario driven adoption to derive the highest ROI. The use cases or scenarios of adoption for maximum ROI is focussed on investing into Social Media as a platform to empower and pursue higher returns over traditional channels of engagement or business functions, i.e., Marketing, Sales, Services, Support, etc.,

Every adoption of the Social Media platform revolves around key goals, as in my illustration as below.

Social Media Goals & Measures - A Framework 

The key is to first identify the components or parameters that will help us 'Quantify and Qualify' the road to realizing the set goals for every scenario. The above framework briefly depicts the goals, measures, governance, practices over the platform.

Any Intelligence is arrived at only after the a process of Data ETL, Data Analytics based on rule engines. The typical process involves getting sourced data, categorizing and aligning them per the business rule and deriving analysis out of it. Here in a scenario driven and use case specific Social media we need to 'Define' the objects that we need to 'measure'.

What do you Measure?
You want to measure the impact of deploying social media over Sales & Marketing over Social channels, Customer Satisfaction for Community Support using Social channels, Plain vanilla support queries and response measurements driving higher CSAT, Marketing operational expenditure reduction while increasing funnel, Creating channels for revenues for other services / solutions, Brand value appreciation measurements, Networking and connectivity across target user base with measurements for influence - virality - funnel expansions, etc.,

Social Media Business Intelligence - Goals
The analytics that are framed and inferenced drawn are to enable and assit the organization in 1. Performing critical and key decision support, 2. Increase subscriptions, userbase, influence and brand awareness, 3. Generate content and collaterals by crowd sourcing, drive community collaboration, 4. Traditional business process channels 'Operational Expenditure' optimization, 5. Increasing revenue and conversion funnels.

The Process Drivers
The entire process of defining, measuring, analyzing, create intelligence in this particularly dynamic use case is to have a strong governance and adoption of industry best practices and processes. The core set of process are in the illustration.

Products 
Products that assist in framing a BI, please refer my earlier post.


Jesu Valiant - 2011

Social Media for the Enterprise - Strategies for Maximum ROI

Social Media has taken the globe by storm and there are now newer trends evolving almost all the time, almost all the people who connect to internet have a social media identity. From the advent of emails now social media has truly evolved and has given a better platform to the people. The primary reasons of success for Social media is that people can Share information, stay updated over people they know, interact at will, benefit in the varied collaborative workflows it can offer, create public groupings or private restricted groupings, and much more. This ability to act at free will, collaborate, ideate and stay connected has become what the populations have been missing. We even had regime changes in countries instigated by Social media activism.

Social Media dynamism, science and working is unique and can be adopted to Enterprises that have their own community, they can on-board existing traditional engagement channels into Social media and offer an unique customer experience. There are always huge benefits in closing out a successful Social Media channel for enterprises. Simply the Science of Social Media can allow a definitive and a sea of change for enterprises who will want to pursue new ways of global outreach and engagement of customer communities.

Adoption of Social Media in enterprises has to be done with utmost importance and involving best strategists who can do the job. There are many product platforms that gives a host of features that can be adopted, but enterprises are not here to purchase 'available' feature sets and implement. No single product in the market gives you the ability to do multiple Social Media tasks. Here below we will see the top strategic adoption scenarios for Social Media for enterprises based on the current market dynamism.

There are frameworks, methodologies, practices and process systems created to add tremendous value to enterprises seeking to deploy Social media strategies, With the application of Social Media strategies and by incorporating the best practices honed; enterprises can now pursue providing strong value to their engagement models by providing the need driven, value based solutions over Social media. Enterprises have a list of priorities that they should achieve by deploying Social Media platforms; these priorities are scenarios in which they get the maximum return over investment. These scenarios are the traditional engagement methods thats packaged and deployed over social media platforms; with a global community and outreach like never before. Have listed below few of the direct, maximum yield Social Media pursuits that I could research and list.


Social Media - Strategic Solutions Framework

Social Media Strategic Solutions for Enterprises

Enterprise Collaboration Enablement:
Enterprise Collaboration enablement helps leverage the right set of tools and services to help quickly build fast and efficient systems and processes for setting up collaborative knowledge sharing and collaboration applications within a secure, unified system.

Enterprise Support Enablement:
Support enablement helps leveraging the evolved and rich practices, process systems that can be deployed to customer service staff, external customers and partners. These groups are able to access vital knowledge quickly and easily. Customer service desks are increasingly under pressure to make efficiency gains, cost reductions while at the same time providing a faster, more accurate, more consistent service to customers.

Social Media Monitoring & Engagement:
Social media monitoring is all about searching for key words and phrases being used online to hear what’s being talked about. Its all about homing in on the data, conversations, dialogue, and other bits of information that are relevant to the organization's business. From communities that converse about business to people talking about your broader industry or even your competitors, monitoring is about harnessing the conversations that matter to your business.

Social Media Sales Enablement:
Organization's sales people ideally should be selling and not sift through legacy CRM systems, piles of emails and stagnant intranets. Solutions should provide channels to improve TAT for the teams and helps arm them with vital information, collaborate with experts, close deals and thus increase the win rate.

Web Collaboration & Intelligence:
Ability to perform analysis on social media metrics, segment data, and generate reports to connect the dots for social media measurement and ROI. Solution should offer full access to the social web in real time. The solution platform should capture hundreds of millions of posts each day, including Facebook, blogs, news sites, discussion boards, video and image sharing sites that are not unified by one platform. Ability to look into multiple web sources to gather and categorize information based on rule sets.

Deploying a social media solution for any one of the enterprise use cases has to be tied down to industry best practices that have evolved and keep evolving. With a strong metrics and governance process, the Social Media enterprise implementation can be realized and rich ROI reaped. My illustration above captures the major goals and the processes that help in achieving those goals.

Jesu Valiant - 2011

Social Analytics - Gaps & Top Applications

Every organization and corporate house is participating in the Social Media; its come to a point where PR’s focus now are into Social Media. Social media opens a direct channel with the customers with their respective direct identities and hence more ownership and interactions; suddenly a new transaction medium and channel with direct commercial implications. Value spewed by Social media channels now has made the most stiff-necked CEO’s bend down and deploy Social media strategists, this channel has truly emerged and maturing quite fast.

With the Social media becoming a business accelerator and Gartner identifying that Social Communications and Collaboration & Social Analytics as the Top 10 strategic technologies for 2011; the game in this space is heated and the market is lapping up every possible skill to make the most of this new front. With all the transactions and the buzz around the social web that is happening there is an immediate need to monitor, record, analyze, model, gather intel over these transactions. The market now has hundreds of Social Media analysis companies rendering services and providing products, of these products there are a host of features on offing, only few however provide solutions addressing the need.

At the first look every product looks similar and there is not much difference; when drilled down over product usage, product adoption, flexibility, rule sets, parameters, people & pages analysis, integrations, key social web performance indicators; there are only a few that surface to meet the demands. With not in any particular order the following are the ‘surfaced’ and recommended products. The hype over this market segment might fizz out and we will have audiences investing into products and solutions and discover that not all was good that meets the eye.

So what are the products that have some credibility, good rate of adoption, good support, mapped to best practices? At the outset I had dwelved deep trying to understand the feature sets vis a vis solutions that can be created and how good they address the emerging market needs.

Top Social Media Analytics Products:

Sysomos Heartbeat 2.0
Sysomos MAP
Edge3
Kontagent
Radian6 Dashboard
Radian6 Engagement Console
Alterian SM2
Attentio
DNA13
Fangle
Research.ly
Beevolve
Social Mention
CollectiveIntellect
ScoutLab
BrandsEye

 

Most Wanted Social Media Feature Lists:
Timeline Analysis
Funnel Analysis
Viral Optimizer & Analysis
Revenue Tracking
Traffic Source Optimizer & Analysis
Retention Workflows
Competitive Analysis
Geographic and Demographic Data
Key Influencer Identification
Key User / App / Page Engagement
Comprehensive and Spam-Free Database
Real-time feeds & captures of blogs, message boards and other types of unstructured data
Real-time analysis of blogs, message boards and other types of unstructured data
Comprehensive and constant web coverage
Social Media Metrics
Data Filtering and Segmentation
Workflow Management
Social CRM and Web Analytics Integration
Automated Sentiment Analysis
Historical Data
Listening Grid
Real-Time Coordination
Case Based Reporting
Complete Activity & Conversation History
Social Profiles
Integration and Interops Capability
Efficiency and Productivity
 

Jesu Valiant