Case 2: Gathering Social Intelligence

In recent years, social networks have become widespread throughout society. No one can deny that social media has completely changed the context of privacy, shaping and reshaping relationships, exaggerating the ideals of sharing and rebuilding daily routines to visit friends online at least once a day. Thanks to social media, people can now share every detail about the most mundane things in life. Updating where you are at a given time alerts your friends to what you are doing, but it also allows companies to learn how to better market products and promote celebrities.

Responding to the growing influence of social networks and, in turn, demonstrating another crucial role of the phenomenon, all kinds of organizations are finding value in monitoring and digesting the continuous flow of publications in the world of social networks. For example, traditional business intelligence (BI) will tell you where your products sell well and where they don't. But it won't tell you why your product sells well in one place but not another. By integrating social media with traditional BI tools, you can monitor everything that is said about your products on various platforms. With such social intelligence, you can get deeper and more timely information about customers, learning why a product is not being sold. As we all know, information can travel fast on social networking sites, as information goes viral when people like, share and retweet information. By carefully monitoring trends, companies can stay ahead of the competition as new information begins to trend. Countless successful organizations are actively monitoring social media to gain social intelligence regarding the feelings of current and future customers.

Social media has not only become an important source of up-to-date information for businesses, but is also becoming a valuable resource for police and other first responders. Social media users have shown that crisis information can travel at a pace that rivals 911 services. In fact, analysis of public information is not unusual in the world of intelligence gathering either. Today, social media has people competing to express who they are and what they think, information that has never been so vast and openly accessible. Using that information, the US government is developing tools to forecast everything from revolutions to economic upheavals and changes. Recently released documents also reveal that the US National Security Agency (NSA) uses Facebook and other social media profiles to create maps of social connections. From commercial corporations to government agencies, ideas about what is happening, or about to happen, can be obtained from social media, where people are forced to share what they know or think with almost anyone.

Have you checked your Facebook news feed today? Or, more precisely, how many times have you been on Facebook since you woke up this morning? It's amazing to see what social media has become in a big part of our lives. Just by keeping an eye on how many posts your feed receives in an hour, you can easily imagine how analyzing these massive amounts of posts can quickly become a big data problem. On the other hand, obtaining social intelligence has become a big data opportunity for countless organizations.

1. 6-51. How will organizations know what to look for when using social media for business intelligence?

2. 6-52. How can government organizations analyze social media activities to predict social upheavals?

3. 6-53. Given the speed and volume of activity on social media, what business analysis and visualization tools could be used to make sense of the information?