SOCIAL BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE (SBI)

THE CURRENT STATE OF SOCIAL BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE (SBI): EARLY ADOPTION

The opportunities produced on social media platfonns for firms are often acknowledged by software developers. The growth of social media and the reputation of BI amongst organizations, software solutions which offers social media ‘intelligence’ have grown rapidly. Consequently, tools for analysis of information become extensively accessible at cost-effective prices [9], some are even offered free of cost.

EMERGING SOCIAL MEDIA BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE VENDORS

Companies which are based on the application of social media in their organization runs a cycle constituting of three steps; (i) monitoring, (ii) analyzing, and (iii) engaging [10, 11] that uses social media monitoring platforms. The aim of these platforms is ‘listening,’ for monitoring the brand(s). The collected data in this phase is constituted by mapping customer perceptions, sentiments measurement with the suggestion of the company’s achievement with respect to social media.

The promising social media intelligence tools are described as follows:

• 1. Radian 6: It offers social media monitoring tools, social media engagement software and social customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing software. It offers companies with social analytics that constitutes social media metrics and sentiment analysis. It also offers firms with a dashboard for demonstration of its performance on social media. Accordingly, online discussions can be scheduled.
• 2. Kapow: It proposes solutions for the access, extraction, and enrichment of web data [10]. The application of public web data for business intelligence is demonstrated by software developer which will mention the software providing framework for social media data thereby converting it into deducible information. One of the major tools offered by Kapow is the monitoring of social media platforms.
• 3. evolve24: It will mine precedence’s and convert the scores online for providing applicable intelligence to the management. Its software permits user in creation of custom dashboards for the presentation of social media metrics which have relevance with the firm. It also allows predictive modeling for the prediction of results of certain issues, since the decision, making procedure in the organization goes at par with the information [12].

4. NetBase: It permits users to path social media concerns connected to the interested topics. It processes numerous social media posts for extraction of structured insights which can be used by the enterprises for quick discoveiy of market needs and trends, quantify market acuity regarding products, services, and companies [13].

INTELLIGENCE PROVIDED BY SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING TOOLS

Social media tools, which comprises of monitoring, analysis or intelligence tools, contribute to the performance of firms on social media in various ways. The innovation of social media and its applications on business intelligence is still unexplored. Therefore, a very few scientific literature is available in this area. Most of these documents denote the same variables for measurement of their self-discovered attributes. Prevailing attributes of social media and intelligence which are provided by the social media monitoring tools are enlisted herewith.

• 1. Volume of Posts: It quantifies the amount of messages or articles concentrated on a topic that have been created on social media within a time frame. The volume of created social media posts which contains firm’s name (or product/service name) demonstrates the limit up to which a company’s topic is discussed in social media. It can change from day to day or even from hour to hour.
• 2. Engagement: It represents the extent up to which a user is involved with the brand. Generally, this engagement is measured through the quantity of likes, followers, shares, retweets, etc. Doeland [14] differentiates engagement metrics into distribution metrics and interaction metrics. Distribution metrics elaborates the extent of visibility of an organization to social media public, while interaction metrics describe the limit of public engagement with the brand.
• 3. Sentiment: Most of the software tool offers sentiment analysis, which is a measurement representing the attitude of the content produced by the social media users. Commonly, social media posts are categorized by positive, neutral or negative by linguistic algorithms. These algorithms ‘simply’ mines the text of each post connected to the organization and connects words and phrases like

‘great,’ ‘wow,’ ‘good,’ ‘super,’ etc. with a positive attitude. Posts containing words like ‘bad,’ ‘dumb,’ ‘worthless,’ etc. are categorized as negative posts.

• 4. Geography: Upon registering on social media platform, a person needs to produce some personal information which includes his residence. Although authentic information is not guaranteed but social media monitoring tools makes use of this information for determination of the location where the posts has been made. In addition, cellular devices can use a GPS component for providing the social media post with more precise geographic information.
• 5. Topic and Theme Detection: Social media monitoring tools has provision in providing details in the primary topics and themes consisting of dataset in relation with the firm. Topic and theme detection permits firms to accumulate understanding of frequent discussed topics which embodies the social media posts in relation with the firm.
• 6. Influencer Ranking: Nearly all social media platfonns-and particularly social networking sites-supply the possibility to follow other users. As an outcome messages that is shaped by people with numerous followers comes within scope of many other users. Social media monitoring tools will aware the numerous followers of the people who posted a message that contains firm names.
• 7. Channel Distribution: For the assessment of the social media platforms firms which are discussed by social media monitoring tools supplies awareness on the circulation of posts connected with the firm among dissimilar platforms. Thereafter firms can undertake a decision focusing those platforms which are under the topic of discussion.

REQUIREMENTS FORMULATION

After a study on the social media monitoring tools which are grounded on the knowledge we have gained while performance of content analysis (CA) on the social media messages linked to distinct firms, the following necessities for business intelligence methodology have been generated.

• 1.3.4.1 DESCRIPTION OF REQUIREMENTS
• 1. Having Access to Social Media Platforms: Firms should have access to different platforms where messages are produced for generating intelligent information from social media data.
• 2. Identification of Social Media Platforms Under Discussion: A

survey on platform distribution will cater firms with an idea about which social media platforms should focus, engage or advertise. Although firms, the matter might be discussed on numerous platfonns but all of them need not be monitored separately. These tools offer monitoring and engagement of different social media platfonns in one dashboard.

• 3. Identification of the Volume of Social Media Messages Relevant to the Firm: Consistent monitoring of the social media messages focusing on the firm permits the occunence of sudden deviations, demonstrating that “something going on,” and requires a special attention from the management.
• 4. Removal of Spam from Social Media Messages which Might be Related to the Firm: Abundant social media messages containing firms in their posts, doesn’t have any relation with the firm which is a drawback as they will not detect all firm related messages uses generic names in posts. Spam messages should necessarily be removed from dataset since they are valueless.
• 5. Anonymization of Personal Data: Because of the new regulation by European Commission processing personal data, firms are disallowed from processing which allows one to retrace a natural person from that data. To work according to the new Regulation, firm plans in collection and processing the social media data for its anonymization.
• 6. Identification of People Who Discusses the Firm on Social Media: Although Kaplan and Haenlein [15] demonstrated that the usage of social media is diversified according to the users’ age, it is reasonable in determination of people who discusses about the firm on social media.
• 7. Identification of Subjects of the SocialMedia Messages Connected to the Firm: It is also precious for a firm to have an idea about the matter which social media users confer regarding the company.

• 8. Determination of Information that Contains Additional Firms Value in Social Media Messages: A CA of a set of social media messages in relation with firms reveals that there are some messages which involve the firm’s name, but doesn’t enclose any information of any value which are referred as undefined posts.
• 9. (Automatically) Classification of Social Media Messages Related to Categorization of Finns: Due to the unstructured character, social media posts of messages needs to be pre-processed before commencement of analysis. Classification of the messages in categorized manners like subjects, languages, men, and women, many or less followers, etc. permits a firm in structural analysis of messages and derivation of the particular infonnation which the firm is interested in.

The unstructured nature and the large amount of messages which are generated in context with some firms makes the social media data termed as “big data.” So there lies a requirement that the categorization method of the social media messages runs automatically by automatic classifiers.

• 10. Form a Relation of (Categories ol) Subjects of the Social Media Messages to the Firm’s Key-Performance Indicators: There lies a possibility of the classification of social media posts into categories in relation to KPIs. The subjects of the social media posts serve the basis in assignment of a certain social media message to a certain key-performance indicator.
• 11. Determination of Firm’s Social Reputation: A SBI methodology should lead to the determination of the firm’s influence on social media. The volume of messages in relation with the firm does not have any value if there is no awareness in the nature of these messages. Social media monitoring tools offer the possibility in determination of the sentiment of a social media post.
• 12. Determination of Social Reputation to the Firm’s Product(s)/ Service(s): Along with the firm’s social reputation, it might be interested in the reputation of a product or service which it supplies. Therefore, sentiment analysis is a requirement for these posts. The social reputation of products-calculated by the percentage of positive posts in relation with that product or service-reveals a relation with the sales or quantity of returns of that product.
• 13. Determination of Relations between Social Media Metrics and the Firm’s (Social) Key-Performance Indicators: Prehminary objective business intelligence is identification of activities of a firm deliverable value. For determination of which social media metrics forms a relation to the firm, the SBI procedure necessarily contains a stage where the affinity amongst social media metrics and the firm’s KPIs are detennined.
• 14. Updating the Status of the Social Media Metrics and the Values of the KPIs Constantly: For the development of real-time business intelligence, the system must automatically monitor the social media metrics. The firm gets an affinity on the values of the social media metrics and the values of the KPIs.
• 15. Presentation of Slope of the Relations between Social Media Mettles and KPIs on a Time Chart: This necessity assures that the slope of the values is demonstrated in such a way so that deviations over tune are recognizable easily.
• 16. Interpretation of the Gained Intelligence and Cater the Firm’s Development: The derived intelligence can present the relation of social media metrics and KPIs and providing a vision of the external stakeholders’ perception on the firm, we should position this intelligence within the developments of firm.
• 17. Assignment of Gained Intelligence within the Right Persons in a Firm: Whenever situation arises, some KPIs are affected social media metrics, and are under performing, the acquired intelligence should be disseminated to the accountable departments within the firm.
• 18. Allowing a Firm in Engagement on Social Media Platforms: A

SBI methodology should permit firms in engaging with the users on social media through social media discussions.

19. Regularly Updating the Search Terms in Anticipation of Changes: A fluent SBI method starts with search terms in relation with the firm. Since a firm always develops, it will initiate new products, services, and employees will come and go. As a result, the search terms should be updated when there are events which influence the required search terms.