Part 2
Part 1 explored the emergence of social media and collaborative decision making. In Part 2 we explore the different role of social media and the scales of engagement.
Customers and Social Media
From the social media statistics quoted earlier, it is easy to see how a walk down the street would reveal customers, people, employees, students that are getting involved in making their thoughts known online in a collaborative fashion. These groups of people are almost all consumers and will play a role in how your company is perceived in the market, develops its products, is serviced by corporate entities and whether they will want to work for you in the future. While it is almost a certainty that they will become involved in social media of some description, the question is how involved? There is a spectrum of engagement in social media that is worth exploring before uncovering the value that these participants can provide since this involvement has a direct relationship with value.
Fig. 3 – Examples of Participant Involvement in Social Media
Referring back to the original examples from the introduction, participants in social media can have a very passive involvement but still contribute to the overall theme or meme and ultimately still have a big impact on how one is perceived depending on how influential this individual is. Twitter has also been renowned as a crowdsourcing vehicle. In crowdsourcing, an individual or company looks to a wider audience (crowd) in order to assist with gathering ideas, content or general assistance in resolving a problem. Although this is off the topic of BI and Social Media, it is interesting to realise how powerful and lateral crowdsourcing and passive Social Media can be. In a more interesting example, Coca-Cola will use a combination of Twitter and Facebook to crowdsource a new song for Maroon 5 (Yahoo! News 2011). Fans will be able to provide feedback during a 24 hour period where Maroon 5 will develop lyrics and sounds for immediate feedback. Both Coca-Cola and Maroon 5 will benefit from the exposure and create a new way for them to interact with their customers.
Moving along the spectrum to a more collaborative style of social media is YouTube. Subscribers and users of YouTube have a more active engagement with Twitter in that rather than simply tweeting thoughts to a wider community there is the opportunity to truly interact with the other users in a meaningful way by commenting on uploads, viewing videos, uploading videos and developing user profiles to create a true web presence and identity. The value in a collaborative type of social media is not so much on an individual contribution, but rather on the aggregation and analysis of a group of people sharing common ideas. If you were to search on YouTube for “funny cat videos” and only 1 video were displayed with a funny cat, this might be interesting (and hopefully humorous) but the impact to what you might do from a marketing and sales perspective would likely be minimal. The reality is that a search on YouTube using these key words returns over 755,000 results with the top funny cat video being viewed almost 50 million times! This isn’t necessarily an indication that you should move into the business of making funny cat videos, but knowing this content and these categories can be mined from collaborative Social Media networks can be powerful in devising the next marketing campaign or investment in social causes such as the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in the event where funny cat videos are in favour.
In the most involved category of Social Media are examples like Wikipedia where a community of users is actively creating, editing, reviewing and sharing ideas to create something that the world can benefit from. These active participants are quite different from the majority of passive contributors. These are people that have a vested interest and are emotionally attached to the outcomes and products produced. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia and the extent of involvement is a clear indicator that people are willing to contribute online to something they believe in. Understanding that there is a massive community that is willing to actively participate is a first step. The next is to use expertise location techniques (potentially evolving into your BI platform) to understand who in the community of customers may be willing to become contributors to the betterment of your product or service. An electronics manufacturer found that there was a customer who understood its products as well as the engineers who designed them.(Gartner 2011) By identifying this talented individual and proposing they become involved with online help the company was able to better serve its customers and reduce customer service costs.
Using BI to Deliver Value from Customers Using Social Media
The story of the poor beggar is a reminder of what can happen when we don’t notice what simply standing up and doing things differently can find. A poor beggar sat on a box for years and asked for money from passer-bys. One day a rich man asked, “What’s in the box you are sitting on?” Surprised and somewhat annoyed the beggar stood up and looked inside the box he had been sitting on for years. To his surprise it was filled with gold. To look inside the box and discover how much gold is there for you, it is useful to refer to a framework for an outward-looking model of Business Intelligence and Social Media.
Fig. 4 – Applying BI to Social Media and Social Media to BI
The spectrum in Fig. 4 represents ways in which to engage the Social Media content to add value and accumulate knowledge about customers, suppliers, partners, investors and other stakeholders in order to achieve a competitive advantage. Broadly speaking depending on the application of technology, the type of industry, external stakeholder involvement and a variety of other factors will determine the actual value that your organisation will receive. One of the biggest challenges of using BI with Social Media information is the unstructured nature of the data. I will try to address these questions through each topical area.
Moving from left to right (passive to active) across the spectrum, the categories can be summarised as:
· Using Business Intelligence to Analyse Social Media
· Extending Business Intelligence to Social Media
· Incorporating Social Media into Business Intelligence
Using Business Intelligence to Analyse Social Media
Any marketer will get excited at the prospect of uncovering information about her customers. Even better, in the sales department the rising and extensive use of Social Media such as Twitter and Facebook have contributed $9 million (Humphries 2010) to the top line at Dell through its more than 3.5 million followers in 2009. So the big question is “How can I mine this information to turn it into more sales, higher customer satisfaction, lower costs and decreased customer churn?” A good starting point is to start using business intelligence analytics to identify the major trends in the market that you are interested in.
The challenge is easily recognisable. There is an immense amount of information and interactions. The volumes that were referred to in the introduction is incredibly vast, and arguably the information largely not useful for the business purposes of your organisation. The data is fluid, and not meaningful unless the context of the text, video or sound is fully understood. If I did a search on Twitter for “Coca Cola” and “happy” one might think that the responses would all be positive for the brand. Having done the search, it is true that generally these encapsulate a trend of loyalty to the brand such as “Coca Cola makes people happy” from one Tweet. On the other hand there is another that states “Happy Mardi Gras(: tonight's the last night for Coca Cola for me :(“ These reveal two very different messages about the brand.
Social Media Intelligence (SMI) tools are developed and evolving to make sense of Social Media in the context of your company and its initiatives. Karan Chadha of Infosys summarises the key functions of SMI tools(Chadha 2011) :
· Geographic and Demographic Bucketing: An insight like “half the people liked this new launch and half didn't” is far less useful than an insight like “most of the teens liked it and most of the middle aged didn't.” These kind of bucketed insights empower companies to prepare segment specific strategies.
· Knowing the Influencers: Among millions of participants on the social space, there are a few who drive conversations and play a critical role in shaping opinions. For instance, a few social activists can frantically post all over the social space about environmental unfriendliness of a new product and thus influence opinions of many. Several SMI tools provide this feature of identifying such opinion leaders giving companies a chance to foster relationships with them.
· Red Flag Alerts: Several SMI tools provide red flag alerts when a situation demands an immediate action. For instance, a company comes up with a new version of its free-to-download music player software having a critical bug. An SMI tool, by analysing comments over Social Media space will raise a red flag thus alerting the company. This insight gives the company an option to immediately fix the bug and put it back thus preventing a widespread loss of face.
Tying this back as a passive approach to monitoring Social Media interactions, it is important to evaluate the type of monitoring that will be most useful and provide the highest return on investment in your industry. Even though the technology to understand human languages at a meaningful level is still in the future, the high-level classification of interaction types as they pertain to business functions can provide immediate value.
