To get the most out of your Social Media data you need a strategy plan!

There is nothing new about creating a strategic plan for how you as an enterprise want to act in any given situation in your business. A strategic plan for your use of your Social Media data is simply to highlight critical decisions or trade offs from the collected huge amount of data.

Social Media data is considered to be critical data. Social Media data complicating matters in a new twist: critical information often resides outside companies, in unstructured forms such as social-network conversations. To be able to create value for your enterprise it is important to create a social media strategic plan at CEO/CMO level to establish investment priorities – balance speed, cost and acceptance and to create the conditions for frontline engagement.

Have you created a Social Media data strategic plan?

This seams simple and obvious to develop a Social Media data plan, but in many company cases the missing step to create a simple plan for how data, analytics, tools and people can interact to create business value is not as obvious as it seams. On the other side the power which such a plan creates in making a common language for management to discuss where the greatest returns will come from and, more important to select the two or three places to get started makes a huge difference for any enterprise. The essence of a good strategic plan – weather it is for Social Media data use or for another purpose -  is that it highlights the critical decisions or trade-offs an enterprise must make and defines the initiatives it must prioritize.

What will make management, to workout a Social Media strategic plan is if there is a compelling reason to act; One such reason is when business has to consider which part of the businesses will get the most capital, whether to emphasize higher margins or faster growth and which capabilities are needed to ensure strong performance in your social media plan. To make such a plan there are 3 elements the enterprise has to have in place;

• Data
• Analytical models
• Tools

Speaking of Data, it is important to have a game plan for assembling integrating and make an output of data which could create greater value for the entire business – this is essentials for the business. The next data question is do we as an enterprise have the right processing and storage capacity to create a format of data that could be used in sales and production.

But being able to integrate data is just not enough to create value. Advanced analytic models are needed to enable data-driven optimization (for example, of employee schedules or shipping networks) or predictions (for instance, about flight delays or what customers will want or do given their buying histories or Web-site behavior take the case of Sainsbury they have to collect their costumers buying behavior and even conversations and analyze the outcome. IBM Pure Data System for Analytics is a software and Hardware solution for working with advanced analytic models. The system which is based on Netezza technology[1] is a simple tool for data-intensive analysis. It simplifies and optimizes the performance of data services for analytical applications, making it possible to run very complex algorithms in minutes instead of days, which is important if you want to get value out of your social analytics.

Once you have taken the data in and analyzed it you want to have the proper tools to get your information out to management and frontline people in your enterprise and make them use the information to start getting the value out of the information. What’s needed are intuitive tools that integrate data into day-to-day processes and translate modeling outputs into tangible business actions: for instance, a clear interface for scheduling employees, fine-grained cross-selling suggestions for call-center agents and sellers, or a way for marketing managers to make real-time decisions on discounts. Many enterprise companies fail to complete this step in their thinking and planning—only to find that managers and operational employees do not use the new models, whose effectiveness predictably falls. If employees do not use the new models the social media investment will not be worth the time and effort – so it is very important that every single person in management and frontline takes the Social Media models seriously again to have a return on your enterprise investment.
It is important to combine the 3 elements to create the foundation which the enterprises can formulate an integrated a Social Media data plan. There are no doubt that there are variations from enterprise to enterprise and different sources of business value creations, but you have to have a plan and this plan should be a part of your strategy to create the most value out of your social media data and help grow your business. The next we will have to look into is the three key planning challenges – they will follow in the next blog.

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[1] Netezza (pronounced Ne-Tease-Ah) designs and markets high-performance data warehouse appliances and advanced analytics applications for uses including enterprise data warehousing, business intelligence, predictive analytics and business continuity planning.