The role of Analytics in the Social Business

Blogging live from the Orlando International Aiport after a week of Social Business at the Lotusphere conference, I can’t stop thinking about the importance of analytics in the upcoming Social Business revolution.

If I were to give a 60 second pitch on the Social Business. I would describe it as a holistic output of two major inputs from leadership perspective.

1. Explicit change in organizational culture to foster an open and social processes. (Enterprise 2.0 tools etc)
2. Information Management Infrastructure re-design. (Social Software, Analytics, Monitoring, Business intelligence).

Social analytics is in the roots of every single process within an ‘social’ organization. For instance, from social media marketing to product development to business intelligence to business process management. We will need to open up all of these processes to gather data.

Noise vs Quality

As they say, more data, more problems. There have been 1600 tweets in the 2 seconds it took you to read this sentance . Twitter alone generates about 8TB of data every 24 hours.

The issue isn’t that we aren’t capable of listening. My research and observation indicates that there isn’t a lack of data available from social input perspective but most aren’t doing a good job of actually sorting of this data for quality metrics, insights and KPIs.

There is too much noise in the space and all of the inputs will require a sophisticated infrastructure to make sense of it all.

Leadership Dilemma

To able to compete effectively in the upcoming “Economy 2.0″, the leadership will require better insights, which is only possible when we are able to able make sense of all this data.  Smarter technologies coupled with smarter analtyics will allow us to sort this in real time as we listen to the organization internally and externally.

Changing customer expectations

Blame it on Apple, Zappos or any other organization that is focused on bringing top notch brand experience.  It is no doubt that consumer expectations have changed. It is the same very nature which is also evolving the enterprise space as well. From mobile first strategies to over 1600 iPads being used alone at our opening session at Lotusphere #LS11. The consumer behavior is also unforgiving and strict and allows for minimal mistakes (and they cost as well!)

Analytics will allow us to listen proactively, make sense of the data and respond in a more credible manner in terms of marketing, sales, product development, design and even overall brand experience.

We already have firms like Marketwire, IBM, SAS, Microsoft focused on bringing in tools that allow you to make smarter decisions in this and tomorrow’s economy. The only question is when are you ready to make the jump?

Lotus Knows Lotusphere’s first ever Tweetup!

I am very excited to announce a Lotusphere mini Tweet-up at the Opening Reception.  This mini networking event will allow business partners, clients, and friends that are active within the social space to connect and meet in real life.

So far, we have had a very warm response from the community to the tweet-up and I wanted to personally extend the invite to anyone else who is able to join at 6.30PM at the Sunday night Opening Reception.  If you are interested in attending or assisting with the tweet-up, please feel free to ping, email or tweet.

LotusKnows Tweetup!

My co-hosts of the event: Rani Salehi, Brian O’ Curran, Luis Benitez, Sonia Malik

Full map: www.wdwinfo.com/resortmaps/swandolphmap.htm
Let’s meet near the playground near the Grotto Pool. We will probably move to “N” besides the Pool.

@BilalJaffery

According to mashable.com, Twitter meetups, or Tweetups as they’re commonly called, are pretty much ubiquitous these days. You can’t escape them. The @ nametags. The random awkward conversations that result when you have more than 140 characters to express yourself. Tweetups take an otherwise great service like Twitter and turn it into something much bigger. Lotus knows the power of the community.