US: CRM platforms contain only some of the information pertaining to business contacts and customer prospects, and so those tasked with business development spend an inordinate amount of time searching for information that will give them the “big picture”. The newly published report “Social Search & Analytics” questions if social search and analytics can come to the rescue? Ovum believes it can certainly help.

As Richard Edwards, Principal Analyst, comments: "Ovum believes that organizations must revisit their information management, privacy and governance policies if they are going to capitalize on the “social web”, as these clearly have a bearing on the extent to which information pertaining to specific groups and individuals can be used."

According to Trampoline Systems – a company specializing in business social analytics – some corporate customer relationship management (CRM) platforms contain useful information on less than 25 per cent of contacts in a customer database. Although this figure is somewhat worrying for those tasked with delivering business value from CRM solutions, it probably comes as no surprise to a significant proportion of account managers and sales executives.

A press release adds that social discovery uncovers the business relationships that matter the most.

Accessing the “missing” 75 per cent of actionable information is vital from a competitive and business survival perspective, and so organizations must consider the option of information discovery tools alongside traditional enterprise search solutions. An increasing percentage of “real customer intelligence” is to be found on the Internet and social forums in particular, and so enterprise search and social analytics solutions must have both reach and range, i.e. the ability to crawl, catalog, index, and analyze unstructured information from a plethora of sources.

The economic downturn has resulted in many organizations restructuring their businesses, and as a result client contact databases are no longer up-to-date. Winning new business through cold calling was never easy, and today’s economic climate has made it a whole lot harder. According to Nigel Edelshain, CEO of Sales 2.0, “social calling” (or a “warm introduction”, as traditionalists might call it) is 8–10 times more effective than cold calling, and so the business value of social connections is there for all to see.

Search technologies enable social network analysis solutions to reach into corporate messaging systems from which strengths and weaknesses pertaining to business relationships can be determined, but this only provides part of the picture. An increasing percentage of the workforce is using online social websites to broaden and deepen their social networks. Networking has always been important in business, but some organizations are rightly concerned about the information that employees are sharing on these networks.

Sales and marketing executives are well placed to champion corporate investment into social analytics, the report adds. Discussion groups and forums belonging to online sites are not under the control of the corporate marketing manager, and so CIOs and those responsible for information governance must consider ways in which they can at least gain an insight into what is being said about the organization in these “obscured networks”.

Ovum believes that organizations must revisit their information management, privacy and governance policies if they are going to capitalize on the “social web”, as these clearly have a bearing on the extent to which information pertaining to specific groups and individuals can be used.