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restrictions around legacy and without slow moving business processes, may even be able to react faster and more instinctively to the insight they get from their data analytics.”


SOCIAL MEDIA 5


Chewing through vast amounts of ‘Big Data’, needs some powerful machines, but this needn’t be out of reach of small businesses


Social media – including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter – is something most


businesses have at least dipped a toe into, but which very few do well. Given the inherently democratic


of automated systems monitoring people, infrastructure, communication and, often, other automated systems. The level of detail in which even the most mundane activities are now recorded is quite an achievement, but is it actually useful? This is where the concept of Big


Data steps in: chewing through this mountain of raw information to find patterns, trends and – ultimately – draw valuable business lessons.


Big Data specialists are now keen to talk to the SME market. The applications through which smaller businesses might gain a competitive edge are limited only by the imagination


The processing and storage muscle needed for this kind of heavy lifting has most often been reserved for deep-pocketed corporations. However, with lowering IT costs and the rise of technologies such as cloud computing, many Big Data specialists are now keen to talk to the vast SME market. The potential applications through which smaller businesses might gain a competitive edge are limited only by the imagination. Every time a customer tweets


about your product or posts to a social networking site through a mobile phone, they leave a data-rich footprint. From this snapshot, it is possible to learn more about their preferences, habits and other interests, allowing you to better tailor your offering. From drawing out relationships


between location and spending habits, emotion and flavour preferences or a host of other more complex chains of cause and effect, harnessing Big Data could make your business more responsive and – crucially – competitive. Dominic Pollard of the Big Data


Insight Group said: “Smaller, more agile companies, with fewer


nature of these services, even a small slip up by a junior employee can be seized upon by angry users and quickly go global, trashing hard-won reputations in seconds. Equally, businesses which try to squash their blogging or tweeting employees can end up simply inviting the negative attention they were trying to avoid. So, what is a customer-focused,


forward-thinking business to do? First, know what you’re getting


into. Social media is a conversation, and many businesses – even those which claim to be engaged with their customers – struggle


to keep up their end of the implicit bargain. Too often, organisations will launch with a fanfare, spend months using social media as a one-way platform for promoting their own services, then pull down the shutters as soon as customers begin asking awkward questions. Second, make sure employees


know where they stand. A formal social media policy may seem like overkill, but having the rules set out in black and white is really in the interests of both parties. A good policy should be flexible enough to cover new technologies and unexpected situations without the need for much interpretation.


Those businesses succeeding on social media are easy to spot. They are the ones talking to customers, answering their questions and actively resolving their (inevitable) grievances in plain sight. If a business’s Twitter timeline


does not include a healthy smattering of @ symbols (indicating a tweet directed to a specific user) the chances are they are doing something wrong.


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