Gathering Intelligence with Social Analytic Tools

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

According to WikiPedia

“A broad definition of competitive intelligence is the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organization.  It is about making the organization more competitive relative to its entire environment and stakeholders: customers, competitors, distributors, technologies, macro-economic data…”

The explosive growth of social media information has made traditional customer intelligence gathering technologies less effective means to get insights on users.  New spheres of influences are often left unnoticed or if noted, left without a systematic approach to gathering, defining, and evaluating the data into predictive analytics.  A new generation of analytical tools have become readily available via the enterprise wide social media networks like Chatter from Salesforce.com, or Sharepoint from Microsoft and Web2.0 from IBM to complete the more traditional intelligence gathering methodologies.

IBM SPSS unit will use the information gleaned from social analytics to drive predictive analytics applications. IBM is trying to take sentiment analysis by linking its recently introduced social analytics tools to its suite of predictive analytics tools so that a company can ultimately take action.

Social analytics tools from Salesforce.com’s  Radian6 and Microsoft’s Sharepoint Enterpise are excellent at putting together a comprehensive view of your company’s social viability in a fashion that can rank, categorize the information for actionable business results.