Thanks for an insightful post, Dion. At Jive, we think there's no doubt about the value of the coming intersection of Big Data and Social Media for enterprises. As you point out, the combination of deep mining at very large scale over both structured and unstructured information can produce insights and intelligence previously hidden.
For us, the value to companies is central to guiding how we?ve shaped the Jive platform. And while the Social CRM use case you concentrate on here is certainly an obvious place where our web-scale machine learning and data mining can make a difference for users, we think there are some additional possibilities as well.
Take improving collaboration within or between enterprises for example. Yes, Big Data analytics can power dashboards of activity and help you monitor and even predict what?s happening. But what if you could use the same capabilities to personalize recommendations, intelligently filter huge streams of information, and draw the right people into the right discussions? What if you could mine not just Twitter, but combine the entire social web with your current and legacy enterprise systems (CRM, email, CMS, etc.)? What if you could use those techniques to learn what those people cared about most, and improved over time?
The combination of Big Data and social media analytics provides entirely new ways of making information useful. Getting the right people working together towards common goals means creating social capital and trust in communities, and allows for new, higher quality conversations to take place and be made available in the future. It means being able to swarm the right resources ? which could be people, documents, conversations, or other artifacts ? around emerging community needs. And it means creating higher-performing teams that can deliver results that CFOs can measure.
The combination of Big Data and social analytics will go far beyond "eye-in-the-sky" dashboards and sparkline indicators. The real emerging promise of Big Data and social analytics is creating a fundamentally new kind of technology that learns to adapt itself to you in order to surround you with the resources you need to be effective in a work context. That work context could be inside your organization, or collaborating with a partner organization, or working directly with external customers. Any way you look at it, Big Data techniques in social media will create entirely new opportunities to create meaningful relationships that can add value for enterprises.
And that is an incredibly exciting future.
David Gutelius
Chief Social Scientist
Jive Software
Discussion on:
Message 10 of 1
The best of ZDNet, delivered
ZDNet Newsletters
Get the best of ZDNet delivered straight to your inbox
