Monitoring Twitter key to customer engagement: Gartner

Mining social networks can provide insight into customer perspectives for CIOs, according to analyst firm Gartner.

Analyst Jeffrey Mann told a group of IT leaders at the Gartner BI Summit in Sydney last week that there is a large amount of valuable information located in social media.

“There’s a great deal of information in social media and there’s a huge amount of interactions happening,” Mann said. “This presents the ultimate potential for value.”

When developing a business model around the use of social media, Mann said CIOs must view the information they receive from social media in an alternative way.

“One of the questions I often get is ‘What is the business model for sites like Twitter?’” Mann said. “The information they are gathering is the business value.”

Using business intelligence software to sort through the large volume of information on Twitter was the next stage of developing a business model around utilising social media.

“The challenge is getting value out of the huge volume of Tweets and into a phase where you can get value out of it,” he said.

“How do we get from that large mass of stuff into something that we can interpret? That’s the connection with business intelligence.”

Rather than simply focusing on the interesting aspects of data on social networking sites, Mann said CIOs must move to the next stage of using such statistics to interact with the public.

“As we collect this information data, it allows us to extract more meaning from these particular insights,” Mann said. “… One of the dangers is that a lot of social media analytics seem to be interesting.

“If it’s not something that will change your [organisation’s] behaviour, it’s not worth spending money on.”

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