Political and Business

We had a number of reactions to our blog post earlier this month about BI and Data Visualization Trends, and one of the topics that seemed to catch people’s attention was the area of social media and BI. So we decided to delve a little deeper into the topic.

As we become more reliant on online social networking sites to connect with our friends, peers and colleagues, we sometimes forget that we are generating an unprecedented amount of data about ourselves, and in doing so we are essentially providing a wealth of demographics, opinions and behavioral information for third-parties. A large number of businesses are now gathering real-time intelligence and using social media data to gain a competitive edge. Organizations can analyze the data to better understand customer feelings and satisfaction, market trends and threats from competitors. From a cultural point of view, the data can also provide insight into the collective opinions of the public on current issues, including political events, social crises (such as the BP oil spill) and even reality TV shows. However, social data is arguably the most challenging to integrate into a BI platform because it is so fluid and unstructured. BI pros are used to working with financial and sales data, which has a more clear structure. But, as John Thompson, CEO of Kognitio’s U.S. operations says, How do you take 140 characters of what Tim and Donna said, put it in a database and run a trend line on it.

Social media and business intelligence are hugely different; so different in fact, that the strengths and weaknesses of each often compliment each other. When you see something interesting in a chart or dashboard, your first instinct is something like I’ve got to tell someone about this or I wonder if they know about this. Intelligence always stimulates a Social impulse. Now turn it around the other way. When you are with colleagues discussing how to deal with an issue facing the team, what is your reaction Probably something like let’s start with facts or what do we know about the situation Social collaboration always stimulates an Intelligence impulse.

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