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Social Networks: Businesses Still Question the Value
While Social Networks continue to grab the headlines, businesses are still unsure of how to turn Social Networks into tools that can be used to their advantage. Many companies have been able to prove return on investment when Social Networks are applied to marketing, but beyond marketing, there are questions of how else Social Networks can help grow businesses. Some people have suggested that the flow of incoming suggestions and comments from customers using Social Networks is invaluable and data feeds from these services should be included as part of Business Intelligence operations.
But it may be too early to tell if there is BI benefit from Social Networks. Many companies say that they don’t find value from Social Network traffic. One business commented that “there are not as many customer conversations going on as the media would have us believe.” In fact, 23 percent of businesses said that Social Media was ‘overrated’. And only 14 percent said that it makes sense to try to incorporate information from Twitter into their Business Intelligence gathering.
When viewed as a business intelligence gathering tool, as many as two-thirds of businesses say that they are still ‘undecided’ about the value of the data that could be collected from Social Networks.
While companies feel that it may be too early to plug Social Media data into Business Intelligence, that’s not to say that Business Intelligence isn’t on the radar of companies.
In fact, many companies are looking to Business Intelligence in 2010 to help their companies better compete. Nearly half of businesses feel that BI is an important strategic tool for their operations. And because of that, nearly a third of businesses plan to invest in BI tools in 2010. Many businesses plan to deploy these new systems quickly — on the scale of weeks — and are looking for “quick wins and new opportunities” from the new systems. And a good chunk of that money may be headed into SaaS BI offerings.
The results of the survey were sponsored by Kognitio, a business intelligence software company.
