Here at Collective Intellect, we talk a lot about the evolution of social media analytics and text analytics and its far-reaching influence on business processes. There are the obvious applications of text analytics in marketing and sales but how does our analysis of social media conversations change the way a business might run.

There are new and unexpected efforts to integrate social media analytics into a company’s larger picture. I’ve been reading quite a bit from Lora Cecere about supply chain transparency. To paraphrase, once a company begins truly engaging with their customer, then the relationship will influence every point along a business process: manufacturing, supply chain execution, suppliers, etc. When a customer begins to demand information on the quality of the products they purchase: safety, organic, etc. then the whole system on which a company is built will need a new level of transparency.

Of course, you can’t talk about business process without mentioning Social CRM.  This article Analytics: The Spark That Lights the Social CRM Fire echoes some of our thoughts around data analysis.  A company’s critical first step is engaging and listening to their customer. A more fundamental next step is analyzing both how a company is interacting with their customer but also what their customers are saying, why and where.

Once you begin to open your business process to your customers, there’s obviously a whole new depth to the relationship but it also introduces a new level of complexity. What impact will new levels of transparency have on legal and HR? Will customer perception and conversations influence recruiting? Will a company demand the same level of transparency from their suppliers? And of course, privacy issues are and will continue to be extremely critical to a customer’s level trust. I don’t believe this evolution will occur immediately, but there are obvious trends to suggest that this change is already under way.

Social media technology is already being leveraged in the work place. Tools that allow employees to share documents are not new but to collaborate, share ideas in real-time is becoming more common.  How that information is collected and more importantly analyzed is the next step. Analyzing work-related conversation can potentially reveal insights into a business development, shortcomings of a project or capture emerging ideas and new revenue steams.

Ultimately, how social media analytics or text analytics is integrated and embedded into a company’s businesses process is evolving.  The only thing we know for certain is that sophisticated aggregation of data and robust analysis will influence every part of the organization.