"The popularity of social networking sites, coupled with our 24/7, always-on mobile devices, means that data and opinions are always 'flowing.'"

Opening Statement

Over the past five years, the use of social media has grown at a staggering rate. As a result of this profound movement, social media venues such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ are being widely leveraged by large multinational organizations in an effort to reach out to larger audiences around the world. In the October 2013 issue of Cutter IT Journal, we explored the question "What is the value of social media analytics?" Now, in this issue, we take a closer look at this growing phenomenon of social media by exploring the perception, the power, and the promise of social media analytics.

According to reports, while the worldwide growth rate of social media adoption is slowing, it is still predicted that the total population of users within the various social media venues will top the 2 billion mark by 2016.¹ Note that this year alone, it is estimated that over 1.6 billion people will log into social networking sites. That represents a 14.2% growth of adopters from 2012. This double-digit growth rate is expected to continue well into 2017, where current trends show that over 2.3 billion people will be participating in some kind of social media activity. Much of that growth is expected to come from less developed markets such as India, Indonesia, and Mexico.²

As a comparison, consider that over 108 million Americans watched the Baltimore Ravens beat the San Francisco 49ers 34-31 in Super Bowl XLVII.³ While that NFL championship game broke numerous records on its way to becoming the most-watched television show in US history, social media discussions represent a brand of marketing that can reach (if not easily surpass) those Super Bowl-sized audiences on any day or at any time of the year. As a result, marketers have seen the rise of social media as a promising channel for their activities. According to the Dachis Group, social media has a characteristic that is not seen in traditional marketing channels, namely, "scale."⁴ Discussions are not just a one-time event; depending on how viral a topic becomes, the "campaign" could last weeks (if not months). The popularity of these social networking sites, coupled with our 24/7, always-on mobile devices, means that data and opinions are always "flowing."

Stories of researchers combing through thousands of microblogging messages for insights and opinions about a variety of consumer goods abound in the literature. In one example, researchers from the University of Wolverhampton in the UK have analyzed hundreds of thousands of such messages across the Internet. Their results indicate that the use of these microblogging services (such as Twitter) can play a key role in supporting and enhancing important business processes.⁵

Through social media interaction, companies are able to find everyday consumers who show unusually high interest in a particular product or brand. These individuals have a certain level of influence based on their popularity and reach. In this case, "reach" is defined as how often a tweet is referenced by someone. If an individual is deemed to have a high degree of influence, he or she is likely to be much more credible than simple mass advertising. By identifying these influencers and embracing them, a mutually beneficial relationship is formed; the company receives credible advertising through the influencer, and the influencer is able to strengthen his or her influence with help from the brand. It's a win-win situation.

But what is the organizational perception of social media analytics? Are organizations actually deriving value from an in-depth analysis of social media? We begin this issue with an article by Cutter Senior Consultant Curt Hall, which leverages a survey conducted by the Cutter Consortium to understand the status and level of adoption of social media analytics across a number of enterprises worldwide. In performing the survey, Cutter used companies of various sizes (less than US $1 million to $50 billion) and from various geographies to ensure a broad sample. According to the survey, many companies are still unsure of the value of social media analytics, with a large percentage of organizations either opting not to analyze this data or indicating that they simply don't know if they will at this time. In this eye-opening report, Hall points to major obstacles that these survey participants view as barriers to entry. Issues range from the lack of both best practices and skilled personnel to concerns about privacy and the actual utilization of the results obtained though social media analysis.

As author Philip K. Dick once said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." With that in mind, we move on to a fascinating article by Garrett Hall and Kevin Winterfield, which explores the power of social media analysis and insights. In the article, the authors provide an approach for extracting value out of social media by treating it as a new channel of communication between businesses and their stakeholders. They begin by describing a situation that grew organically (i.e., without the benefit of strategy or forethought) within their organization. Using the results of this haphazard approach as a baseline, they then laid out a strategy and a detailed metrics-driven approach to analyzing social content. According to Hall and Winterfield, "We believed we would drive better results by engaging with experts and influencers and telling our story through them instead of broadcasting marketing messages from behind branded social channels." The new approach places influencers at the center of the universe and utilizes branded accounts to disseminate their messages. "The success of this strategy," the authors note, "lies in giving our subject matter experts stronger and more effective voices in digital venues." The authors demonstrate a very rigorous application of a measurement framework for collecting data at each stage to inform the execution of the strategy. This use case helps bring a sense of reality to the possibility of leveraging this new world of social media analytics.

We follow this up with an article from Viktor Arvidsson and Jonny Holmström that emphasizes a strategic approach to extracting optimal value from social media analysis. The authors offer some interesting perspectives about the volume and velocity of social media data. They observe that where organizations previously struggled in their decision-making processes due to incomplete information, now they struggle with problems of filtering, selecting, and making sense of an overwhelming amount of information. In exploring these ideas, the authors examine a specific use case in which a Swedish city relied on social media to respond to a health crisis. In doing so, they identify three key aspects of a social media strategy that we believe should be considered by any organization looking to leverage social media:

1. Don't respond to the environment; respond with it.

2. Don't invest in social media technology; invest in organizational transformation.

3. Social media necessitates rethinking organizational boundaries.

In this thoughtful case study, the authors explain how each one of these aspects can be critical in realizing optimal value from social media investments.

Next we consider the promise of uncovering interesting insights or observations from all of this social media content. Can we really discover new and interesting pieces of information? In their article, Brenda Eschenbrenner and Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah ask a question that is directly related to the theme of this month's journal: "What business objectives are being most aggressively pursued using social media?" To answer it, they report on an extensive analysis of the use of Facebook by the Big 4 accounting firms. The authors used a number of categories to analyze the information presented in Facebook "fan" and "career" pages, specifically analyzing them for a number of topics relating to (among other things) recruitment, knowledge sharing, and organizational culture/change. One of the interesting findings from their analysis was that most of the recruiting on these Facebook pages happens indirectly through socialization efforts as opposed to directly recruitment-related activities (posting résumés, scheduling interviews, etc.). The lesson here: sometimes what we expect to find in various social media outlets isn't what we get. Their explanation for this phenomenon is that Facebook is not currently considered an appropriate platform for activities related to recruitment (even though there are pages explicitly dedicated to that endeavor). It's an interesting reality check for those of us looking to analyze the large amounts of content within Facebook. Finally, they conclude with some "words of caution" that management should consider as they formulate their organization's policy on the use of social media.

We wrap up this issue with an article that emphasizes the role of strategy in an organization's social media-related investments. This is a critical point. If we believe that the large population participating in social media discussions can provide us with new and relevant insights, we need to ensure that our investments in uncovering those insights aren't throwing good money after bad. In their article, Akshay Mathur, Jagdish Bhandarkar, and Shanmugam Periasamy extol the virtues of a strong strategy and present a unique process framework with some thoughts on its implementation. One of the central themes in this article is the exploration of various approaches to measuring the ROI of a social media strategy. This goes directly to our question of how to measure the value of social media analytics.

ENDNOTES

¹ Bennett, Shea. "Social Media Growth Worldwide -- 2 Billion Users by 2016, Led by India." Mediabistro, 19 November 2013.

² Bennett (see 1).

³ Riccobono, Anthony. "Super Bowl 2013: How Many People Watched the Baltimore Ravens over the San Francisco 49ers?" International Business Times, 4 February 2013.

⁴ Huddleston, Erik. "The Future of Super Bowl Ad Success." The Dachis Group Blog, 10 February 2012.

⁵ Salampasis, Michail, Georgios Paltoglou, and Anastasia Giachanou. "Using Social Media for Continuous Monitoring and Mining of Consumer Behaviour." International Journal of Electronic Business, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2014.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Matt Ganis is an IBM Senior Technical Staff Member (and Certified Scrum Professional) within the IBM CIO organization and part of the ibm.com site architecture team. He is the chief architect for IBM's Internal Social Media analysis initiative and a senior member of the ACM. Dr. Ganis also serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Agile and Extreme Software Development and has authored a number of papers/books on his experiences with Agile methods, including the Practical Guide to Distributed Scrum (IBM Press). He can be reached at ganis@us.ibm.com.

Avinash Kohirkar is a Program Manager for Social Analytics within the Social Insight Group area of the IBM CIO organization. He has a strong technical and business background across various disciplines based on numerous projects executed within IBM as well as with IBM customers. For the past couple of years, Mr. Kohirkar has been focused on implementing technologies to facilitate social media and text analytics as well as in identifying business value for a variety of use cases within IBM. He has authored a number of articles on this subject for Cutter IT Journal, as well as Infosys Lab Briefings and IBM white papers. He can be reached at kohirkar@us.ibm.com.