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Social Media and Business Intelligence

To say that social media is important would be an understatement. Microblogging sites like Twitter, social networks like Facebook, blogs, and social news sites like Reddit all allow people to share their ideas, thoughts, and opinions nearly in real time. A very important question that any large business should ask is, "What role does social media play in our business intelligence strategy?"

Why Social Media?

Two major reasons for analyzing social media and incorporating it into your business intelligence strategy are (1) that it allows you to better understand various players in your markets, and (2) it helps warn you of any surprises -- think damage control.

In the first case, there are numerous examples of social media sites responding to announcements in near real-time. Numerous bloggers and Twitter users discussed the launch of Apple's iPad on January 27. Such responses are not limited to major product launches. Though the media traffic is often much lower, many press releases get discussed in blogs, and news stories are regularly circulated. At the very least, online forums and newsgroups -- especially those focused on investing in public corporations -- discuss seemingly mundane and banal details numerous times a day.

Knowing what the groups above are saying is important when designing products or exploring what customers are thinking. In the worst case scenario, such monitoring helps deal with damage control. Monitoring the media and understanding what is taking place allows a company to deal with unforeseen events. An infamous example is Google's accidental posting of a six-year old story about United Airlines going bankrupt. The mistake made the company's share price fall 75%, and monitoring social media for such blatant mistakes is worth the investment.

While this is an extreme example, knowing when customers are complaining or organizing themselves against (or in support of) your brand is crucial information. In such cases, even an early warning -- even by a few hours -- could help with damage control.

A Social Media Mining Strategy

Numerous options exist for data mining social media. In my opinion, a good social media mining strategy would incorporate a number of data collection and analytical methods:

• Web Crawling: you do not know what people are saying without visiting their websites. As such, the most important factor is actually visiting websites and logging what they say. One can make a list of relevant websites, or simply crawl the web and look for times when a specific company or brand is mentioned.
• Link Tracing: with the web crawls above, one has access to two important pieces of information, (1) text of the sites, and (2) their hyperlinks. Mapping out which sites link to which other sites will inform you of how various people discussing your company actually link to each other and whether they are aware of each other.
• Content Analysis: using the text of the sites themselves can inform you of what people say about your company, and which words they tend to associate with your brands. One can also automate the content analysis to provide near-real-time warnings about negative sentiment about a brand (though whether such warnings are accurate is still a controversial debate).

Next Steps

If you are interested in learning more about social media mining, feel free to contact me.