The Hidden Value of Social-Networking Data | WPN World People News

More and more businesses are using social networking to keep in contact with their customers and to track how their products are performing. Yet social networking can offer much more (in the form of analytics) to businesses that know what to look for.

Social-networking sites are ripe targets for companies to gain new business intelligence.

Posts and conversations on social-networking sites are turning into the latest form of big data, with large amounts of data being stored and available for analysis. That allows businesses to apply the same tools used for big data analytics to social networking.

Many vendors are coming on the scene to offer analytical technology for this market. The idea behind these technologies is to identify customer sentiment toward a particular brand or product, which a business can then translate into marketing fodder.

A good example of this comes in the form of what Wall Street is attempting to do with social media and social-networking services. In a quest to gain a competitive edge, Wall Street traders and brokers are using socially aware big data analytics tools to monitor conversations, tweets and posts to social-networking sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Analytical tools that sort through this massive amount of data are using complex algorithms to monitor and decode the words, opinions, rants, and even keyboard-generated smiley faces posted on social-media sites. Wall Street is regaining insights into the mindset of consumers and the general feelings toward the market, the economy and the political environment. What’s more, that analysis can determine the communal mindset of consumers and their general feelings toward the market—the biggest element being consumer confidence.

Tomorrow, we’ll discuss some of the new solutions that are available to perform the needed analytics on social-networking sites.

Frank Ohlhorst is an award-winning technology journalist, professional speaker and IT business consultant with more than 25 years of experience in the technology arena. He has written for several leading technology and business publications, and was also executive technology editor at eWEEK and director at CRN Test Center.

Source : Smarter Technology