contextual analytics

Customer Intelligence in a real-time social eco-system

The pressing need in customer intelligence is a solution related to a real-time eco-system. One deeper philosophical issue in this space relates to variable velocity, to quote Lee Bryant. Tools like PeerIndex and Recorded Future do a good job of segmenting and defining the truly staggering flow of data AND audiences interacting with that data. Datasift (http://datasift.net/) is a leader in architecting methodologies for analyzing the complex fabric of the social Internet.

For an important new study on Customer Intelligence Trends 2011, see the following Forrester Report: ‎”At the same time, the demand for insight — not just data — in real time creates a challenge but also a huge opportunity to extend the value of Customer Intelligence throughout the enterprise. Leading CI professionals who evolve and adapt to these trends will quickly find themselves at the nexus of the business.” ~from Customer Intelligence Trends To Watch In 2011 (http://bit.ly/customer_intelligence_trends_2011)

WHAT IS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE: DEFINITIONS
(Some basic info below)

Business intelligence (BI) refers to computer-based techniques used in spotting, digging-out, and analyzing business data, such as sales revenue by products and/or departments or associated costs and incomes.

BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of Business Intelligence technologies are reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, and predictive analytics.

Business Intelligence often aims to support better business decision-making. Thus a BI system can be called a decision support system (DSS). Though the term business intelligence is often used as a synonym for competitive intelligence, because they both support decision making, BI uses technologies, processes, and applications to analyze mostly internal, structured data and business processes while competitive intelligence is done by gathering, analyzing and disseminating information with or without support from technology and applications, and focuses on all-source information and data (unstructured or structured), mostly external, but also internal to a company, to support decision making. (SOURCE)

The global business intelligence (BI) software market is projected to reach $12.4 billion by the year 2015, driven by the growing need to empower all stakeholders of businesses with right information at the appropriate time.

Uncertain economic conditions, intense competition and increasing volumes of organizational information are forcing enterprises to seek efficient means of deriving value from information for improving the overall efficiency of business processes. In this regard, BI technology is emerging as an essential tool for identifying new revenue-generation opportunities as well as to control unproductive expenditures. BI offers tools, processes and applications for facilitating organizations to analyze and consolidate data gathered from various sources for optimizing operational performance and for improving business decision-making. BI and analytics software helps organizations to analyze the information built up over the years, which resides in the enterprise systems. (Source)

Useful questions related to assembling social intelligence reports

a. WHO are the influencers around our topic? Who do we recommend as brand ambassadors and community managers from our findings? WHY do we recommend these individuals?
b. WHERE is our tribe, our customer in the social properties, blogs and major web communities?
c. WHAT VOLUME of conversation is there around our target keywords? Where are those large volumes of conversation taking place?
d. What is the SEASONALITY of conversation around our topics of interest?
e. What TIME OF DAY do people discuss our topics of interest?
f. Which LINKS and SPECIFIC CONTENT are people sending to one another related to our topics of interest?
g. In which CONTEXT are the ‘keywords’ of interest used?
h. Which CLUSTERS OF CONVERSATIONS tend to gather the most interest, volume of attention and influence?
i. Which clusters of conversation are most important to our MARKETING campaign’s needs? REPUTATION of a brand? PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT?
j. Which TOOLS proved most effective in our social media property research? Were there differences in our findings from the different tools? What account can we make for these differences?
k. Which METHODS OF VISUALIZATION are most effective in getting the message across to our client?
l. What INSIGHTS are MOST helpful to our client?
m. What can we find on ALL of the above about our competitors?