Social Networks have emerged as a powerful force that enables any individual or organization to raise their thought/ feedbacks about almost anything. This has led to the emergence of products like CrowdBooster, Klout, TwentyFeet etc. which allows to measure one''s influence within the social network. With these tools one can know who is influencing who, what and why.

It is needless to say that there is quite a lot of action in the fields for mining structured data for gaining business intelligence (BI) from them. And with the undeniable arrival of Big Data, the industry is trying to augment the traditional BI with the knowledge obtained from analyzing unstructured data (e.g. data from Social Networks, Documents uploaded, emails etc.). The basic philosophy at work is, if you have a product and/or service, gather as much data as you can (both transactional as well as non-transactional) so that your probability to predict its acceptability grows by mining on them.

Social Networks are already being explored by organizations as an alternate to gather feedback about one’s product and/or service, gain insights about potential employees, advertise about their future products and/or services etc. And from this we can gather (fairly enough) that Social Networks has the potential to exert some amount of influence on the organization – be it negligible or substantial.

As business intelligence solutions mature and expand towards agile models, the use of social network as part of software will become embedded within overall Business Intelligence platforms. The functions and features that currently exist in relation to dashboards, data integration, and analytics provide a good framework for additional features that can increase the interactivity of BI use. Add to this the rise of social media, Business Intelligence becomes a tool that not only provides performance data but also assists with increased relationship and broader acceptance.

Many trends have emerged over time within the BI market. These include data warehouse appliance market, unstructured data, agile BI, the self-service and the list goes on. These trends have one common goal which is to make Business Intelligence more interactive and efficient. Social networks help in bringing these solutions closer to the goal through greater levels of collaboration and ease of use. Within Business Intelligence, the role of collaboration is growing. Whether companies want to communicate more effectively with partners or, customers or with disparate departments and colleagues within the organization, social media platforms increases overall communication.

With the increasing use of communities such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn or for business, organizations are starting to look at many different ways of disseminating messages within their markets. Now that many people make use of these channels for communication and interaction with technology, bringing the similar functionality into business-oriented systems is the next stage of evolution.

Reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_BI
http://www.groupcharger.com/social-business-intelligence/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/gyro/2012/05/22/social-business-intelligence-wisdom-from-the-outside-in/

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