Article: Beyondintelligence.org
SELF SERVICE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND THE SOCIAL MEDIA – PROVOCATIVE POSSIBILITIES Ever since the evolution of the internet, people have been basking in the glory of the information revolution that has been brought about by it. Instant connectivity and enormous reach – these two features of the platform have established the web as one of the most indispensible resource for human beings. The corporate world too is making huge leaps of progress on the back of this soaring technology and the social media is taking things to another level with an added touch of personalisation to everything that a business does. But apart from the marketing point of view, is there any other way in which social media platforms can help corporate organisations in growing and prospering. Let us discuss another intriguing model of using the unharnessed power of these platforms for the advancement of corporate goals – in business intelligence. The first question that might surely have arisen in your mind right now would be – how is any connection even possible between business intelligence tools and social media platforms? BI is usually geared towards data collection and processing to ensure that the right information is provided to corporate professionals to help facilitate decisions. Social media platforms, on the other hand, offer interactive means to engage audiences and customers. How can these two be paired to the advantage of a corporate entity? Allow me to explain. Most companies are now harnessing the power of the internet to ensure that their marketing strategies are executed successfully and their brands create an impactful effect on the psyche of the online community. The internet offers a vast and virtually untapped source of customers, one that no corporate organisation can afford to ignore now. This is the reason why specialist departments exist in companies whose job is just to manage the social media presence of the organisation. But one of the major problems faced by these departments is measurement of results. It is critical to the success of any enterprise that accurate ways exist to measure the effectiveness of any internet marketing campaign, social media optimisation strategy, pay-per-click marketing plan and SEO campaign. Billions of dollars are spent every year on ensuring that something new and exciting is presented in front of the internet audiences to keep their interests alive in your brand. But when it comes to measuring ROIs from these efforts, the means to get expedite and satisfactory answers are virtually non-existent. This is where business intelligence and analytics can play a huge role. These tools can be used to measure the direct effect of online marketing strategies on corporate performance by gathering, compiling, configuring and analysing the data generated by social networking sites in the form of statistics and analytics. Many APIs based applications can be used to export this data to the business intelligence software for analysis and interpretation. The results can then be used pin-point issues and fallacies in the strategy and identify points of success which become the basis for future planning. This is a marriage made in heaven. For more information about business intelligence software, visit BeyondIntelligence.org ABOUT THE AUTHOR Phillip Jones is an expert in business intelligence and information processing models. His articles are a great source of information for enterprise owners looking to streamline their communication and information flow channels. His recommendation is to anyone looking for BI software is BeyondIntelligence.org.