Social media is becoming increasing popular, and businesses are paying attention. Indeed, business intelligence (BI) analyst Abhishek Gattani has dedicate a number of his training sessions and public speaking engagements to this subject. All business executives and managers now have an understanding of the fact that they must use social media in order to market their product or services to prospects and to make sure that these prospects continue to be engaged as well. However, despite this understanding, a lot of managers and leaders struggle to understand how to measure whether social media programs are successful or not.
To Social Media or Not to Social Media
All business projects and programs have to have some sort of measurable success if it is to be approved by leadership and management. The question is, therefore, whether you should make an investment of time and money into a social media campaign because you believe it will work, or because your competition is doing it and you feel you have to as well. If you have decided that a campaign is needed, you also have to think about how you will measure its success, or you will not be able justify your investment. Additionally, you need to know at which point you will call it quits. These are all things that people like Abhishek Gattani can help with.
Media outlets the world over continue to say that investing in social media is a bad idea, because it is impossible to measure its success. However, one of the things that they seem to forget, and what people like Abhishek Gattani are now focusing on, is that there are ways to leverage BI and corporate performance tools to ensure any data generated by social media can be properly collected, analyzed, and translated in a way that clearly demonstrates exactly what the benefits of these efforts are.
BI is about gathering statistical data and turning it into an easy to understand language. From that, important decisions can then be made by leadership and management. Good BI tools demonstrate existing and emerging trends and patterns, as well as issues that can be changed before they become real problems.
Social media has led to some real transformation in terms of how data is generated and collected, and it is perhaps the best statistical measure of success. This is because social media is an opportunity not just to analyze customer behaviors, but also to create more customer awareness of new products and services. That data, in turn, can then be used to determine how big of a role social media has played in making the product or service a success.
Social media, in a sense, is a platform that brings complex BI data and statistics together in an easy to understand manner, as it uses words. This means that the complexities of statistical calculation in predictive models is significantly reduced. That alone should be a good enough reason for businesses to embrace social media as part of their BI and analytics campaign.
