Judeumeh's Blog

What happens when you mash up social media monitoring, insight and sentiment analysis, with business intelligence and BPM? Answer: You get an enterprise that is engaged in multiple ways with its customers, suppliers and even employees. Or at least that is the vision of what you could get according to an offer Capgemini have called ‘Grapevine’.

Apologies if you’ve already seen this topic covered in an excellent post by my colleague, Laurence Buchanan, but even that doesn’t prepare you for a hands-on experience of just one of the key components of this proposition. I am talking about the social media monitoring / analysis part of the solution which I had the opportunity to test drive last week in a partner training session by vendor, Attensity.

Imagine if you or your organisation could see all that is said about you on social media networks, and other online sources, in a way that separates the noise out from more relevant opinions and sentiments (e.g. positive praise or negative criticism), then you can probably understand the amazing power at your grasp, not only to pinpoint and respond to your biggest fans or harshest critics, but to do so with out missing a beat.

And this is where things really start to get interesting, because the BPM part of the solution (from Pega) promises the capability to quickly adapt your internal processes in order to address issues appropriately and in a highly responsive manner, if you so chose! What could possibly go wrong with this picture?

Well, people for one thing, because if your organisation is not geared up for speed and flexibility, or if your culture does not tolerate change and innovation, then you might struggle with this concept – as you probably are currently doing anyway – given the speed of change and perception all around.

Also, to my mind, the ultimate trade-off is this: if end-users can blog / tweet /chat about their experience with your company’s services or products with impunity, then it’s only fair that your organisation is able to respond swiftly and appropriately to its advantage. However this cuts both ways, because although end- users might have, consciously or unconsciously, provided their information to online / social media platforms (which can be legally mined, repurposed and exploited), there is still a perception of privacy, which might get in the way of full engagement with a third party organisation. But that is probably only a transient issue, as more and more people are becoming aware that privacy flew out the social media window / door / portal the minute they signed-up online.