Improving Revenue & Satisfaction With Social Media Analytics

by Madan Thota

Social Media Analytics is a new concept within the business intelligence space.  Research has identified that mining through social data helps organizations to improve their customer satisfaction and company revenues.  One in every four people in the world uses social media for communication, interaction, and maintaining relationships with other people.  This valuable information is all passed through internet protocol. 

This data can help benefit organizations that depend upon online sales or their e-commerce stores.  These organizations can analyze user comments about products and use that information to make decisions to improve their products and processes.  Another key element of social media analysis is the measurment of success within marketing campaigns.  A key element of this analysis is identifing trends and customer sentiment (positive or negaitive opinion). 

There are continuous streams of data that flow within Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs, websites and community portals.  These volumes of data can be retrieved via web services, analyzed and processed.  Endeca Information Discovery from Oracle is an example of a modern powerful tool to help quickly explore and analyze social media data.

Endeca Information Discovery (EID) is an enterprise data discovery platform for rapid, intuitive exploration and analysis of information.  EID can connect to any type of source to extract data.  Endeca Information Discovery supports data cleansing, text enrichment and text tagging to make the data more meaningful.  The tool can also combine structured data with unstructured data and loads data into memory for faster processing and analysis.  Endeca is among the best platforms for visualizations and guided navigations.

Social media applications like Twitter and Facebook are accessible through an Application Program Interface (API) where the analytics platform can sort through web content to extract the desired information.  This social data can be cleaned and processed through its graphs and text enrichment modules.

To amplify the power of Social Media Analytics, data can be combined with existing data warehouse or Business Intelligence solution data to make a more meaningful cross-departmental analysis.  Endeca Information Discovery also supports direct loading of various file types, such as XML, JavaScript Object Notation, and MS-Excel files, for immediate analysis without having to design and develop a data model.  This “Model as You Go” deployment makes EID a perfect solution for qiuck and intuitive information discovery.

Madan Thota is a Director of Services at KPI Partners and works with the expert team within the KPI Partners Offshore Technology Center.  His professional focus is in the world of enterprise decision support, business intelligence, and data architecture.  Check out Madan’s blog at KPIPartners.com.