Social media, while relatively a new phenomenon, has become ubiquitous globally and is

changing how people interact. People share their thoughts and opinions and engage with their
friends, family, acquaintances and even strangers through these platforms. This means social
data has become very valuable for businesses to understand, communicate and acquire
customers. Businesses are using these platforms as broadcasting and listening tools.

Powerful solutions like these present challenges to the businesses on how to effectively r their
customers as well as how to extract valuable insights from user-published social data. While
there are different listening tools available in the market, the real challenge is in deriving
tangible value - by separating noise from the collected data. Social data is very noisy and hence
transforming raw data into high quality workable data is a complex heavy duty task. This, along
with profiling the actual users behind this data is hugely dependent on application of big data
technologies and data science.

As the volume of data grows the technologies in this area are also maturing in tandem,
particularly the Amazon, Apache and Google ecosystems are offering revolutionary capabilities
relative to even 4 or 5 years ago. It used to be that only limited amount of structured data - of a
few gigabytes a day - could be processed and that too at a high cost. Today with tools like
Google Big Query and Dataflow the data volume is not even the primary consideration –
enabling massive unstructured data processing of many terabytes an hour.

Newer data science methods also aid predicting future outcomes and what if scenarios from
social data. If we look at marketing analytics as an example, we could see that businesses have
been investing heavily on tools and practices to monetize social data. For example, Telecom
companies listen to social media and create innovative products to increase customer loyalty,
reduce churn, cross sell, up sell, provide customer care and increase their market share.
Another example I would like to quote is E-commerce companies, where they thrive in a market
that’s very close to perfect competition where almost all the players sell identical products,
have relatively small market share and buyers have complete information about the market
including feedback from peers about the product. Flipkart, an Indian ecommerce company,
allows users interact with their friends through a chat application and get their opinion before
buying the product. For the customer, their decision is vetted by fellow users on their
purchasing decision; for Flipkart, this information becomes social data for further analysis. For
ecommerce companies, speed is a key factor of success - in gaining competitive edge and this is
now becoming the exclusive domain of social data.

We are also witnessing software giants like Google, Hootsuite, Salesforce, Qlikview, Tableau,
etc., investing heavily on R&D and developing interesting products on social media analytics;
Tier 1 telecom operators, multinational FMCG companies, pharmaceutical companies have also
subscribed to those products and have started to listen, engage, measure and analyze content
in social media. Additionally asset management tools are also on demand for managing social
assets as these companies have social presence in multiple platforms, countries and for
multiple segments.

Latent Semantic Analysis technique in Natural Language Processing (machine learning) is also
providing results closer to human analysis hence the unstructured information from social
media can be clearly differentiated from noise and can be used for critical decision making
process. Majority of the analytics are based on Volume metrics and Content. Volume metrics
based analysis helps understand engagement level, reach, impression, number of reviews, likes,
favorites and trends. And Content based analysis helps understand market sentiments and is
also helpful in segmenting user profiles based on different attributes.

The speed of progress in social media analytics so far is impressive however one area of
deficiency is the integration of social media platforms with other main stream systems such as
ERP, CRM & KYC. The slowness in integration is partially due to user psychology and partially
the business purpose of social media platforms. Users like to differentiate their social media
identity from their real identity in platforms such as Twitter; and hence do not want to consider
their social media profile as a substitute for email id or phone numbers. Businesses hence are
unable to update their CRM systems with social media profile and monetize the information as
they are yet to distinguish whether a statement is from a real personality or fictitious
personality. Even if the opinion is real, it’s difficult to reach the person from social CRM
initiative or as part of sales process. The original purpose of social media was not to help
business use such data for business analytics hence bigger efforts are required to reposition this
space. However paradigm shift is happening on user psychology as well as social media
platform vendors to aid social media data integrate with other data to get maximum benefit
and quicker RoI, case-in point is Social Care – customer care through social media. This is being
adopted by companies to offer faster and better response