How social media and big data will unleash what we know. With this development -- as the world continues to become more and more social -- competitive advantage will come to those who understand what's happening better than their peers and can directly connect it to their business outcomes and other useful pursuits.
Social networks and enterprise social software has long been driven by two things: The connections between the people that use them and the information they share. Just as Facebook uses the insights gleaned through its analytics on how people behave to enable personalization and better user experiences, the same phenomenon has been happening on the Enterprise 2.0 side, most recently exemplified by last month's acquisition of Proximal Labs by Jive Software. While gleaning insight and contextualizing interaction in social environments is nothing new, the challenge in doing so has been pushing the boundaries of available technology for some years now. Related: How an accidental IT future is becoming reality. Making Sense of Social Data. By Doug Palmer, Vikram Mahidhar and Dan Elbert > Photography by Matt Lennert > Infographics by Ilovedust In 2010, Google’s Eric Schmidt said that “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time.”1 He was referring to the fact that in the digital world, data are everywhere.
We create them constantly, often without our knowledge or permission, and with the bytes we leave behind, we leak information about our actions, whereabouts and characteristics. This revolution in sensemaking—in deriving value from data—is having a profound and disruptive effect on everything from supply chains to corporate strategy. Data is the real business model for social. As social media websites gather ever-growing data stores, they might be better served by finding ways to make profitable use of that data instead serving ads as their chief means of raising revenue.
While the data might give them the information they need to serve more targeted ads — although in my experience they still have a ways to go with that — the real value in the site could be the data itself. Of course, if social sites start selling data to the highest bidder that leaves open questions of data ownership and privacy and finding ways to strip personal identifiers. Marie Wallace (@marie_wallace) is social analytics strategist for the IBM Collaboration Solutions division.