Social business intelligence (BI) is the process of collecting and analyzing data from social media and networks to guide decision making. It uses analytics and internet interfaces to present information in real-time. Social BI is still being defined, with new ways of collecting and analyzing data being discovered.
Social business intelligence (BI) is data collected from social media and social networks. Traditional business intelligence is any business data, such as sales revenue or inventory turnover rates, that can be collected, analyzed, and used to guide decision making. Social BI is a type of intelligence that focuses on information that can be gleaned across the Internet-based connections between businesses and the public. This data is processed through analytics and made intuitive via Internet interfaces that collect and present information in real time.
The widespread use of the Internet and its rapid adoption as the primary means of social interaction has enabled businesses to interface with their audiences in new ways. Various social media and social networking websites have enabled companies to gather an unprecedented amount of consumer feedback on how and why people interact with a brand or product. Social business intelligence is the process of collecting this new type of social data, analyzing it using tools that put the information into Internet-accessible computer formats and using the data to make business decisions.
Social media and social networks include Internet blogs, micro-blogs, forums, multimedia exhibitors, and community-based websites where people are able to express opinions and disseminate information. As these social outlets became popular, companies seized the opportunity to interact directly with consumers but had few established paradigms for meaningfully processing the richness and quantity of feedback. The analysis focused primarily on feedback content and quantity, but lacked an effective way for this information to guide decision making. For example, a company would track the number of times customers press a button to indicate that they like the company or its products on a popular social networking site, but didn’t plan on how best to use that information to guide the planning.
Many businesses also find it difficult to measure the exact impact of allocating marketing dollars to social media campaigns or internet-based advertising. Social business intelligence is about establishing a methodology so that the data it collects can prove or disprove this kind of underlying impact. It uses Internet-based business analytics and other computerized methods of tracking and mining data provided by social media and networks to achieve this. The development of software systems for collecting and managing social BI has become an industry within marketing.
Social business intelligence is an area of market intelligence that is still being defined. New ways of collecting and analyzing data are rapidly being discovered as new software and technologies galvanize the public’s imagination. The best use and rightful place of social BI in corporate strategic analysis has yet to be fully determined.
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