Article

Review
BI &
KM
Social Media Analytics as a
Business Intelligence
Practice: Current Landscape
& Future Prospects

CIA - 3

DILIP K SINGH
1421212
dilip singh

LOS - IJK

AUTHOR - UMAR RUHI (2014), " SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS AS A BUSINESS

INTELLIGENCE PRACTICE: CURRENT LANDSCAPE & FUTURE PROSPECTS", JOURNAL
OF INTERNET SOCIAL NETWORKING & VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES, VOL. 2014 (2014),
ARTICLE ID 920553, DOI: 10.5171/2014.920553

This article gives us an insight about what social media is and how a social media analytics
programme can improve a business performance. Businesses are struggling with adopting,
implementing and institutionalizing methodologies and techniques for an effective social
media analytics program. The article offers a business intelligence perspective of social
media analytics with the aim to provide guidelines to help businesses align their social media
programs, processes and technologies with the overall strategic objectives of the organization.
Whether it is to measure the effectiveness of promotional campaigns, gather insights about
customer needs and preferences, discern brand perceptions, obtain feedback on product
performance, or to capture data on market trends, social media analytics have the potential to
provide useful information to various lines of business such as marketing and sales, customer
relations, public relations and product development.

This paper first provides conceptual definitions of social media and social media analytics
.Then this is followed by examples of contemporary business use-cases and metrics
constituting social media analytics practices. Next, the positioning of social media analytics
programs within the realm of an organizations business intelligence practice is elaborated.
The paper concludes with qualitative research findings from two recent expert panel sessions.
The findings are presented in the form of five key takeaways related to the current landscape
for social media analytics, as well as guidelines for firms looking at adopting various
technologies and processes to enable social media analytics in their organization.
There are 4 use cases that are idententified and used in the paper they are social media
audience segmentation, social media information discovery, social media exposure and
impact and social media behaviour inferences. There are various methods which are
mentioned in order to capture such data, they are natural language processing, complex event
processing, social network analysis and clustered data mining. He has also given some
metrics to measure like topic trends, sentiment ratio, conversation reach velocity, etc. Then he
tells as to how organisations have to identify the relationship between corporate objectives,
KPI and social media metrics.

Research methodology
The data which was collected was qualitative data. The data was collected by conducting
panel sessions where in there were 11 participants and they were divided into 2 groups of 7
and 5 each. The people who were selected for the discussions were experts in the field of
social media analytics. Data which was collected was through group support system and it
was a mixture of structured and unstructured way of collecting data. The results which were
obtained from the discussions were summarised and compiled into themes that the panellist
highlighted as important to the current social media analytics.
The research led to the following results
1. Social media analytics is still at infancy and organisations need to put in a lot of effort
in order to understand the potential and create an effective strategy to implement as a
part of day to day Business intelligence.
2. There are a very few metrics to measure social media analytics and its very difficult to
link them with the KPIs of the company.
3. The ROI is a key question that needs to be asked while implementing BI in social
media analytics and there has been no clear answer regarding the same.
4. The value driver for social media analytics is the integration of the enterprise system
and the business process workflows.
5. The future of social media analytics lies in the exploitation of big data and also by
using social media analytics in predictive and prescriptive rather than descriptive only
analytics
Conclusion
As organizations get more serious about measuring the effectiveness of their social media
initiatives, it is important for them to link their measurement frameworks to high- level
business objectives of revenue generation, cost reduction, or operational excellence. Situating
a social media analytics program as part of the overall business intelligence strategy provides
a practical approach for organizations to get the most of their investments in such initiatives.
As evident from the recommendations in the extant literature and key findings from our
expert panels, a BI orientation for social media analytics has the potential to provide real-time
feedback and actionable insights to help organizations in their decision-making processes
Pros

Use of simplistic language

A good way of representing the article in a streamlined flow
Uncovers a new path for business to look at things from different perspectives and make
decisions

Cons
Use of only qualitative data
No usage of real life examples
The future predictions of the article is based on numerous assumptions which might not hold
true in the future