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Enterprise Usage of Social Data Social Data, According to SocialStrategies.com, it is the collective information produced by millions of people as they actively participate in online activities. Web revolution changed the way on how people talk each other. It is no doubt that our future generations will see their olden days as “Before Internet” and “After Internet”. The Internet world completely changed the life style of humans to a different extent. Recent growth in technology and its availability increased the internet users to an unbelievable ratio. Specifically, in last two years Social Media went to an extent and it started attracting the business with its various strategies. The reason for the attraction is just because of its large number of data. Availability of Social Data makes the internet so strength and the technology industry competing with each other to bring many tools and ways to the consumers / Enterprises regardless of its types like B2B / B2C to leverage the Social Data and help derive their own strategy to grow their business.

Where is the data – Source?

Such a large amount of data comes from internet, how? It is the people and their online presence produces a large number of data every single day. We all know it is big, however it is analyzed to be 548 thousand new Facebook profiles, 350 million tweets, and 422 million Facebook statuses EVERY SINGLE DAY (Source: Social Media Monitoring in 15 minutes by Murray Newlands). Social Media websites, Blogs, RSS feeds collectively forms the Social Data available for anyone to use it. As we see these data are not normalized data, the biggest challenge is leveraging these data in to a useful form. What kind of data is Social Data – Impact to Enterprise? Social Data is everything that is floating in the internet. Consider a simple conversation “Hey I had Quaker Banana flavored Oats today and it is really tasty”. It looks like it is a simple conversation between friends, to an enterprise it is the product that people use a lot for their breakfast. Enterprise can categorize these types of data with various facts like, Geo-location, Gender, Brands, type of food and what not. The data is not just used, Enterprise is reliable to respond to such data if it can impact its reputation because of the fastness that the data can travel and reach many people. If a customer says, “Hey, I had call so and so customer care center but the service was not so good.. Do you know anybody who can help repairing my laptop?” This conversation converts to a sales lead and the customer who posted this becomes a prospect customer that offers repair service and at the same time this becomes an issue to the enterprise that provided the service. If the enterprise does not respond immediately, the message reaches many people in less time. So Social Data is a key to any enterprise that has public presence. Enterprise Usage of Social Data (Social Intelligence) Enterprise can use the social data in many ways that can help their business to grow. Some enterprise also combines their customer data with Social data to create competitive advantage. A good example of this kind of competitive advantage is, when an e-commerce system tries to integrate their customer data with Social Data, they were able to do some predictions like,

1.	Customer’s Selling habits

2.	Products that the customer might interested in

3.	Customer recent searches and enterprise can derive promotions

4.	Customer’s buying habits

5.	Customer’s online presence score – Based on the score, the customer’s influence rate is analyzed.

6.	Can provide better customer service based on the way the customer wanted. Example, Dell recently opened a Social Media call center to attract and serve customers through twitter, Facebook etc.

Big Data vs. Social data

Recently Big-data became a buzz word in any technology talk. In analyzing both, technically both are same. Big data is the unorganized / unstructured data available in a huge form. Social data is one of the big-data that are unstructured and unorganized. These unstructured data is huge and it has a lot of information about everything in the world, to make use of such data Organization should really start capturing the data in a standard approach to interpret the data however the organization needs it. Again there is an always ethical issue around in capturing the data, baseline if a post has been made across social websites they are publicly visible and nothing is private as the service is offered free and the cost to consumers is the data they provide.

Social Data & Enterprise Data

Social Data always kept away from the enterprise data because of its nature of unstructured. Technically, Enterprise data and Social data integration adds more value if it is rightly done. In an Altimeter Group Survey of 27 enterprise-class organizations, 70% stated that they are viewing social data in the context of other enterprise data to make important business decisions. The business divisions like Marketing, Customer Service representatives do look at social data integration with their Business Intelligence to derive their strategies in the business. The below data will show how the business data is integrated with Social data and the departments leverage the usage of data.