Retailers leverage social BI for competitive advantage

With the rise of big data analytics as a field, the unsorted mass of social media data is now available as a useful barometer of public sentiment. This has affected the way businesses interact with customers.

"Whether you're measuring marketing programs, mining customer opinions, or measuring media coverage, social media analytics can help," said industry insider Nathan Gilliatt. "The challenge is in choosing the right tools and methods now available, and using them appropriately."

Gilliatt is the chairman of a new conference to be held in April. The purpose of the industry meeting is solely to discuss the role of social analytics, the first ever two-day conference on the topic. Invitees include vendors, analysts, consultants and end users, all focused on turning social data into actionable intelligence.

Industry source Ashish Gambhir, writing for CRM Media, elaborated on one way that social big data has already changed business intelligence within the retail sphere. He notes that, with the wide availability of social data and the development of services to draw value from it, small and medium-sized businesses can compete with larger companies on more even terms than ever before. The new technology has empowered an entire segment of the market.