Are Social Media and Big Data connected to each other?

With the raising popularity of Social Media corporations need to be able to handle a substantial larger amount of data. Until now the ones who decided how and what to buy of IT equipment was the CFO and the IT manager. Due to big data we have seen a shift in who are taking the decision – the new rising star is the CMO – the Chief Marketing Officer. Marketing are the new collector of data – and in huge amounts due to Social Media data collection the large amounts of data to be processed, used in sales to generate additional earnings. Social Media is communication from many to many the amount of data which should be analyzed by the product and marketing people are huge.

An organization like Sainsbury – a grocery company – has a huge potential of Many – to many communication through their costumer card and membership association. Big data or the ability to analyze and work with Big Data creates the possibility for Sainsbury to communicate directly and spot on with their costumers. 

 

How can the enterprise use the Social Media data?

An example how Big Data and Social Media go hand-in-hand is the online shopping module above. Sainsbury has a number of costumers who has an access code and a username for the Sainsbury membership association. Each time a costumer uses the on-line shopping or attends a Sainsbury shop the costumer leaves a Social Media footprint.  The costumer footprint describes the need and wants of the costumer and is stored in Sainsbury’s IT-systems and can eventually be used to see the purchase pattern of each costumer. Consumer surveys indicate that consumers are quite conservative in their purchase pattern of fast moving consumer goods. The enterprise advantage use of the Social Media data is;

1. The Social Media footprint each costumer leave at Sainsbury web-shop or by registration of their costumer card in a Sainsbury store is a possibility to react towards the costumer. These costumer activities, gives Sainsbury the possibility to communicate directly with their costumer and direct special offers to the costumer due to the costumers purchase pattern.
2. Another advantage is that Sainsbury can control its stock and herby get a better rotation on products, and purchase products. The demand of being able to analyze and use the data proactively requires the ability to use Big Data.
3. The third advantage is that marketing can provide special offers to the costumer via Social Media on behalf of the Data collected from the costumers purchase pattern.

Sainsbury has the costumer purchase pattern – they know when, where and what their costumers are buying. Sainsbury can send their costumers special offers and recommend them to giver their opinion about the offers and share their experiences with Sainsbury and other costumers. To handle all that Social Media data and analyze the data against internal sales and stock data collection you as an enterprise need a lot of computer power to get usable data out of your Big Data.

 

The demand for using Social Media in the communication and sales towards the costumers are developing rapidly. The ability for the enterprise to be able to “listen” to the conversation between the costumers “Tell each other” is only possible if you as an enterprise can collect and analyze the huge amount of data (Big Data) that are produced by using Social Media. The ability to use Social Media demands handling of huge amounts of data that is why Social Media and Big Data goes hand in hand.