The Business Case for Social Networks

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It has been a while since I blogged, BIWA hosted a webcast on Data Mining by Charlie Berger and is ready for another one tomorrow on Oracle database 11g optimizer by Maria Colgan. Her talks are generally "sold out." In my opinion her topic is not mainstream BI, yet something that all BIDW professionals need to know to drive performance out of the Oracle DB based data warehouses. We have a few more talks lined up such as Oracle OLAP at Gallup: A Scalable Unified Approach to BI Reporting by the Gallup folks and then mine on OBIEE Analytics/Reporting Solutions for E-Business Suite

Now that my Blogger status for Oracle Openworld 2009, registration is approved, I am "licensed to blog." :)

You might have observed that the title of this section is "The Business Case for Social Networks" yet I start talking about BIWA Techcasts. Well, I want to build the business case implicitly and not explicitly. You can note that today almost all the BI experts quoted here are using social media to get their ideas across. Apart from being a blogger, this year at Open World I am a panelist in a Web 2.0 session on a topic related to My Oracle Support. From the conventional TAR based support, Oracle is looking to a 360 Social Strategy of Support. We will discuss more about it in the Oracle Panel.

Well, so far I have used sentiments to build the business case for social networks. As an "analytics" person, I am suposed to justify based on hard numbers and real business cases and trends and not on emotions. So here are some solid cases:

New airfare deals pop up on Twitter - but act fast Jetblue posted a "Cheep" Cheaps+ Tweet for $9 one way trip from JFK to Nantucket. United posted "twares" or Twitter only fares that are usually available for next 1-2 hours.

USATODAY also quoted there are 35 million Twitter users already and 45% of 1015 advertisers surveyed by Linkedin said Twitter will continue to grow. Facebook has 250 million members and MySpace has 130 million members. Another article by USAToday shows how people are texting / tweeting several hundred messages a day, to their social circles. Thus, eletronic social media is here to stay both at the social and business level.

Few of the Twitters that I have been following are ERoske, Valueselling, EtiquetteExpert, OracleAce, IOUG and Markrittman and not forget another Oracle Ace Mohan Dutt. I responded to his Tweet and got my Oracle openworld Panelist registration, isn't that enough of a cause for me to be a "social junky?"

Before I close, I want to mention Linkedin, another of my favorite, where I have over 1200 connections. I have started a few successful Linkedin groups like Oracle BIWA SIG, Exadata SIG and IOUG. The collective membership of these groups is in 4 figures.



Comments

Charlie Berger said…
Shyam, I've seen in Semantic "RDF" technology the concept of "whom do I trust most?". Based on the number of cross-links, etc., have you seen Twitter analytics that would help point a nubie Twitter'r to the "best" Twitters?
August 4, 2009 at 8:44 PM
Shyam said…
Charlie
You bring out a good point about the credibility of the information/news over the social media. In particular this post is interesting (see http://louisgray.com/live/2009/01/do-you-trust-your-twitter-news-sources.html )

Even Twitters with a lot of followers may not be (at times! ) credible. Personally, before I follow others on Twitter, I look at their history and frequency of their Tweets and its relevance to me. I periodically monitor their Tweets and decide to keep following them or drop them.

In other words I have not come up with any "analytical" way to selecting who I follow. It would be good to develop a model around it, since Tweets can be easily test mined, number of followers/followed and nature of topics that Twitter Tweets on can be "structured" data in the model.
August 5, 2009 at 5:21 PM
RNB Research said…
I came to your blog just when I was surfing on this topic. I am happy that I found your blog and information I wanted.
August 20, 2009 at 1:39 AM
Shyam said…
"YouTube Pumps More Ads Into Lineup" - Google trying to put YouTube to work from a revenue perspective.

JC Penny is making it part of marketing strategy, see more details in today's Wall St Journal:
http://bit.ly/WlxDA
August 20, 2009 at 4:10 AM
Shyam said…
See this:
http://ow.ly/15MAqq

Social Networks Despite What People Say About You....I Still Want to Hang Out
August 27, 2009 at 5:45 AM
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