Social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, create vast amounts of freely available information each day. However, the growth operational and business related data available to the average CIO today is unprecedented and executives are finding it more difficult to make the right business decisions, because of the volume of amount at hand.
There is a heavy focus on the collection of operational data that relates to the inner workings of the corporation, such as product manufacturing, human resources and managerial policy. Social media can provide millions of users with their own opinions about how products should be marketed, the kinds of products they would buy and which companies are least likely to respond to them, should they have a query.
Chandor believes that this wealth of information should be utilised by businesses not only from a public image perspective but also to assist Research and Development. This would help to bring better products to market faster, based on the opinions of a large number of buyers.
"What we at IBM are focusing on is a new data resource which is freely available. Businesses are not taking advantage of the information that is coming from social media today. If you are able to 'listen' to what the public wants, you will be able to bring products to market far more swiftly. There is a massive amount of opportunity today in analytics for social media.
"The concept of business analytics has been around for a long time, the next wave is predictive and social analytics."
Although there are multiple benefits of business analytics within social media for R&D, marketing and trend mapping, she stresses that it is equally important for businesses to engage users on their respective platforms.
This means quickly and concisely responding to individual queries and concerns via the platform in question while logging this information on a business database for later follow up. In this way, social media analytics can serve to boost the company's public image and keep customers happy while attracting potential buyers.
"The company must be active, not just a listener. They need to get closer to customers using social media analytics. This means asking for feedback on products and services while responding quickly and proactively."
The offerings are primarily hybrid based and incorporate traditional IBM business analytics systems with cloud based applications, which are tailored to incorporate social media into the analytics framework. Many companies are choosing to integrate this information into their financial and operational data streams, resulting in an end-to-end analytics offering, which allows the business to access internal information, which is fed through company systems, as well as external information, which is collected from social media.
"There is still a large part of the business population which hasn't really addressed the value of social analytics. We want to help them along that path and show them where the value lies in the interpretation of this freely available information source," she concludes.
