Jess Iandiorio

While most organisations are aware of, if not fully adopting the term “Big Data” – it’s actually a misnomer. It indicates big data is about size, and that’s not a full representation of the issue. While it is about the ever-expanding Volume, it’s also about:

• Variety, e.g. structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data, and

• Velocity, e.g. how quickly the information diversifies in type and increases in amount.

And many independent research firms, such as Forrester Research, argue a fourth dimension: Volatility. This may be true but let’s not further complicate an already complicated matter.

The biggest culprit of the war on data is, without doubt, social media. While new channels such as mobile and tablet devices for accessing and creating information add more data, they aren’t adding data amounts and types as quickly as social sites – they’re just creating context around where and how the data was created.

To understand the magnitude of diversified data social media creates, consider estimates that more than a million data assets are shared on Facebook every day. Likewise, Twitter usage and tweet volumes continue to explode. This information is largely text based (unstructured), and then there’s semi-structured data like videos on YouTube. Semi-structured means a combination of structured fields (in this case – time, date, length, owner), with unstructured (which is the actual video imaging and sound itself). Recent advances in voice-to-text software have allowed us to bring visibility to words in a video, but even with 90%+ accuracy, you still just have more unstructured data.

This wealth of information provides tremendous opportunity to nearly every business in terms of gaining a greater understanding of their customer base. For a consumer products or retail organisation, social media presents an unprecedented view into customer behaviour, preferences, and product perception. For manufacturers, there’s a significantly increased ability to detect aftermarket support issues before a warranty failure becomes publicly detrimental. For Financial Services organisations who are laser-focused on customer segmentation and creating relevant offers, the amount of attributes you can slice and dice your customers by is now almost infinite.

Belabouring the point isn’t necessary – most organisations have bought into the idea that “Unhinged data” is a problem and an opportunity, but the bigger issue is figuring out how to harness and analyse this information in a meaningful way.

There are three key areas in which organisations should focus the right tools, best practices and procedures in order to enhance business results.

1. Visibility. Arguably the most difficult challenge to overcome is capturing what’s important across the variety of data sources, and surfacing that within one view. While some organisations are just starting to access social media data sources, a large majority of organisations have already managed to access separate data feeds through both paid and free channels. Yet most of those organisations have that information in silos, and aren’t able to achieve a cross channel view of social content. While there is some value in just looking at one source, true context and meaning is only achieved through looking at the intersections among data sources. And this can only be achieved through integrating various data sources and types, and providing a tool to the masses within your organization for the plethora of use cases each business unit has.

2. Rapid Insight. If you think about looking at an excel file which has, for instance, your online sales results from yesterday for all of your product lines – how do you gain insight into the health of your online sales? You look at roughly every top-line cell; compare it to the previous day, the previous week, and maybe even that day the previous year. Especially if it’s the holiday season. How long does this take? Likely hours. And more importantly, you only understand what happened – sales were up or down. You don’t know why – that takes further digging. With the advent of social media, one of the greatest gifts is the ability for companies to understand why an event occurred. Sales went up because Taylor Swift tweeted about loving that brand, and there were 1 million re-tweets. Sales went down because your leading cotton distributor is being exposed for child labour, and that news has gone viral within your leading demographic who is now boycotting all of your products by association. Achieving rapid insight requires finding the technological intersection of a user-friendly interface, intuitive visualisations, and data interpretation technologies such as text analytics.

3. Action. What good is visibility and insight without the ability to take action? Yes, you’re smarter and have been able to figure more things out, but how do you take it the next level and close the loop with your customers? Think of this in terms of a 20% technology, 80% process problem. You have the methods for communicating with your customers, but you may need some extra tooling to do it more effectively. The real challenge for organisations is establishing policies and processes for responding to customers. For instance, allowing every employee to tweet about your organization opens the door for unprofessional responses to customers raising red flags.

To do any of this effectively, organisations need to first identify the benefits they plan to gain, and work through technology and process from there. The most common anticipated benefits today are incorporating the voice-of-the-customer (VOC) into product lifecycle decisions. Many organisations overlook great ideas from some of their biggest brand advocates by not deploying customer communities. And once products have gone to market, companies miss customer service opportunities by not knowing about conversations going on over the web regarding their products.

A good starting point for businesses is to build programs around these goals:

1. Using social media to understand responsiveness to stimulation (ROI of campaigns, promotions, and other advertising mediums). Marketers can think of this as a/b testing turbocharged.

2. Using social media to understand corporate perception. With the blogosphere exploding with a new and more influential voice daily, capture the sentiment of your customers, prospects, and competitors to understand enhancements you can make in products and positioning.

3. Embracing social media as an avenue to create a virtual, unpaid sales team. If someone said to you – I’d like to offer you 5,000 more sales reps for absolutely no money at all – wouldn’t you say yes? One of the greatest powers organisations will see of social media is the ability to make or break your business. Using all avenues at your disposal to engage brand advocates, and change the perception of brand antagonists, and furthermore, enabling them to sell your products for you, will be the way of the future for all businesses.

The best piece of advice, above all, is proceed with caution. Don’t try to boil the ocean – because you can’t. This ocean is infinite. Start with several goals, deploy the necessary technologies and procedures, and keep your employees focused and aligned with your strategy.

About the author

Jess Iandiorio is the Product Marketing Manager at Endeca responsible for Website Search, Call Center and Customer Service, and InFront Intelligence solutions. She helps customers utilize Endeca’s technology to create competitive advantage through enhanced decision-making in both external and internally-facing environments. She is a contributor to Endeca’s blog: ebusinessfacets.endeca.com .

About the company

Endeca is the leading provider of agile information management solutions that guide people to better decisions.

Relevant links

http://ebusinessfacets.endeca.com/author/jharrington  

http://www.endeca.com  

http://www.endeca.com/InFront