The Critical Path

Business Intelligence and Social Networking: “If only we knew what we know”

This is what I hope will be the first in a series of posts discussing the opportunities and challenges presented by social networking. I want to focus on what’s out there and how it can be captured and contained within existing or new B.I. strategies.

Social Networking would appear to have laid its foundations, and in one form or another looks set to be part of our lives for the foreseeable future. LinkedIn claim over 40 million members and highly regarded 140 character upstarts Twitter are 30m users rich and growing. Nielson recently reported “Time Spent on Facebook up 700 Percent” in the U.S. and claimed “total minutes spent on social networking sites has increased 83 percent year-over-year”

“If only we knew what we know” (Jerry Junkins, Chairman, President and CEO of Texas Instruments) became a staple quote for Knowledge Management (KM) professionals and have-a- go hero’s alike during early days of KM. One of the core tenants of Knowledge Management was to understand the “Processes and Enablers” that controlled the creation and dissemination of knowledge in an organisation.

Social networking (SN) gives us a new headache. There is no question that SN is a rich constantly evolving source of knowledge. But but how can we begin to identify, collect, adapt, organise, apply and share that information? The traditional places to cache knowledge in an organisation were email, spreadsheets, personal folders and old crumpled post-it’s stuck to your computer screen. In comparison to SN they now seem accessible. At least in the old days most of these data stores were under the control of the I.T. Director. Nowadays that is the tip of the iceberg, valuable corporate knowledge may no longer be under your control and the question of “who owns the data in your employee’s social networks” is a difficult one to answer.

There have undoubtedly been many disputes regarding the ownership of information contained in SN sites, especially where those sites have been leveraged as a business development tool. The 2008 case of Hays Specialist Recruitment vs Mark Irons attempted to establish if the defendant had used LinkedIn to “unlawfully retain (sic) valuable and confidential client information” An allegation I feel sure will be raised all too often in the future.

Legal issues aside, it would seem to be sensible to implement a strategy capable of dealing with the potential drain of knowledge from your business. I see this happening in two ways:

1. Ensure your organisation has solid “rules of engagement” for social networking.

2. Incorporate SN into your CRM.

I may come back to “rules of engagement” in a later post, but for now want to concentrate on the integration of CRM and SN and the resultant Business Intelligence.

The standard toolkit in any sales based business to identify, collect, organise and share knowledge is the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. CRM providers have been quick to embrace SN with a mixed bag of functionality and features. Microsoft Dynamics now has a Social Networking Accelerator. Salesforce.Com offers Twitter Integration, Facebook Toolkit and LinkedIn integration, all available through their very nifty Appexchange programme. In the hotly contested recruitment space Bond Adapt have worked LinkedIn into the much-anticipated V11 release and Bullhorn continue to evolve their Saas offering. In short, the big players are onto it but the question remains for anyone interested in ROI: how can you leverage that data to impact profit in your organisation?

Next week I will begin to focus on what’s actually out there that’s worth caring about, before going on to look at data capture, tools and B.I.