March 7th, 2012 by Sten Franke
We have been teaching it a while already, in the meantime most businesses seem to have understood. The acknowledge that their own social media activities, and of their employees, are a huge treasure of data that yet has to be heaved, ordered an analyzed.
Latest research supports this thesis. For instance a new Iron Mountain study concluded that most European businesses still do not know how to deal with data stemming from social networks like facebook, twitter, or linkedin. “Although 94% (Europe: 86%) of the German businesses asked in this study are aware of the fact that communication via social media channels can possibly be classified as a formal business process” the paper states. “At the same time 72% of German businesses (Europe: 63%) do not consider themselves as being able to capture the data and information exchanged in social media accordingly”. The authors see this as one possible reason why 90% of businesses ban the use of social media while working to their employees.
However, this hardly affects ever more individuals using social media. A current analysis by Statista depicts how regularly users surf their favorite networks by now:
Not without my facebook
In their examination the colleagues of Iron Mountain picture the situation very negative. They believe that facebook and Co. constitute a similar problem to companies than when email was introduced to the business world. Nevertheless, this example convinces only partly. Even though when emailing started it posed a difficulty to businesses, then firms could not handle the data for analysis properly.
The data and information social networks can provide surmount in importance multiplicately. Social media monitoring and intelligence tools (e.g. the gridmaster) allow the analysis of tweets and posts extensively and to continue working with the gained data.
At Iron Mountain the generated data is perceived as highly huge and unstructured that it is hard to control. Hera again I have to object and refer to our gridmaster. Nevertheless the study is right in remarking that the immediateness and informality in social networks raise the risk of violating copyright or revealing confidential information.
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