Every day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data. That’s a lot! To put this number and how it has evolved into perspective, just this number know that we have produced more than 90% of all online data that exists in the world today within the past two years. Combined, this online data equals Big Data. And it has a lot to do with business intelligence.
Being exceeding interested in the talk of Big Data, I’m inspired by the research and development of Big Data related software and applications. Especially the articles of Jeremiah Owyang and Raj De Datta regarding Big Data and Big Data Applications (BDAs) are interesting.
Defining Big Data Applications or BDAs
The massive amounts of data make the value of good social media management and engagement even greater – and easier to sustain. Parts of Big Data are produced via Big Data Applications (BDA) such as LinkedIn or Facebook. Applications that produce detailed user data to the rapidly expanding masses of online data.
Breaking down BDAs’ structure, Raj De Datta’s article explains: “Every user that joins LinkedIn adds a signal to the LinkedIn BDA stack, enabling the recruiter to harness all their millions of profiles, not just their individual silos. As a result, smaller, specialized recruiters are competing with the biggest executive search agencies with comparable reach.”
The point of Big Data and BDAs is neither marketing nor PR. The point is that understanding how to interact with Big Data can transform how we live, how we interact – and how we do business, insights and analyses we are gradually exploring at Mindjumpers.
It’s all about business intelligence
From a business perspective, it all comes down to business intelligence: if we can manage to filter and funnel this data somehow, we can start mining the data and gain insights into details about our business as well as our fans or followers that we never would have expected or gained otherwise. In addition, if we can manage the BDA’s data, we can essentially analyze how our followers’ friends and connections engage with us.
Enter Social Performance Software. Needless to say, the Big Data hype has also caught the attention of software developers around the world, and a new species of social media tool software is emerging: Social Performance Software (SPS).
The aim of this new breed of software is to, as Jeremiah Owyang puts it: “analyze the conversations of your followers, then suggest which content and media to publish, then determine when to publish, on which channel, and to whom. As a result, content will reach the intended audiences and result in higher resonation, or higher call to action rates.”
So, SPS enables us to perform data mining in the relevant BDA data. On top of that, the SPS will analyze when, where and to whom we should engage to strengthen our brand.
I mentioned the white paper on Actionable Social Analytics by Awareness before, but I would like to show a relevant illustration to underline the purpose of SPS in handling Big Data from BDAs:
Social business is all about business intelligence. Continuously fascinated by the unlimited opportunities Big Data unleashes, I still think that the revolutionary thing about Big Data is the mind-blowing amounts of online data on social media users’ behavior. Data that is sitting there waiting to be analyzed, transformed and utilized. Social data that goes much further than to a simple status update or “like”: it can tell you where the segments hang out, what/who they like, who they are friends with, what they pay attention to right now, which brands they like, where they work, how they are connected within certain segments, how they influence their connections and last but certainly not least, it gives you access to the data of your followers’ friends and connections – in real time.
Big Data Applications and business intelligence: it’s only just beginning
At Mindjumpers, we believe that this space for social performance software development will only expand in the coming years and that the number of management and monitoring tools will explode. The tools that are already being used to monitor social media channels will most likely be upgraded to accommodate these increasingly detailed insight analyses and planning functions.
To be able to filter and analyze these astounding amounts of Big Data from BDAs in real time, will mean an extraordinary value to all companies involved in social media activities. Not only will the actual outcome and ROI of the social media investment become easier to calculate, it will provide detailed insights about your business and your fans’ and followers’ network.
I’m following the development with increasing excitement and am sure that organized utilization of BDAs’ data shortly will become paramount to all businesses.
