The proliferation of mobile technology has left few without a social media presence, empowering individuals through personal and professional connections across the globe. It’s an inevitable aspect of our cultural revolution, and one the enterprise can no longer ignore.  The past few years has softened the enterprise to social networking, even spurring organizations to better leverage internal and external social data to their advantage.

At the recently concluded IBM IOD event last year, theCUBE heard from several executives within the tech space as to the importance of social data.  For IBM this growing interest in social data is a market opportunity for its expanding Big Data product portfolio, marking one of the four pillars of the initiative.  In this article we’ll discuss how social data fits into IBM’s Big Data portfolio, comprised of analytics, cloud and mobile operatives.

BYOP – Bring Your Own Personality

Marcia Conner, Principal with SensifyGroup and a Social Biz Expert and author, discussed during her appearance on theCUBE how social media has helped people realize that they are human beings and there’s nothing wrong with embracing that.  She discussed that in the past, employees had to “leave their personality in the car,” but now, social media has opened up the door for work to “not suck.”

image source: SiliconANGLE

“It’s not that we have all these new data and we can actually be doing more stuff; the question becomes for me (and organizations I work with) what can we remove, what are the policies and the nonsense that happens in work every single day that shouldn’t be there. It’s only there because we don’t have a better way, a more trustworthy and a more human way of actually working together, so it’s incredibly liberating and incredibly open from our perspective simply because it’s less,” explained Conner.

Renee Ducre, Director of Marketing Social Business with IBM, shared how social media is being leveraged by the enterprise to get attention.  In this day and age, attention is not bad, it is a commodity.  The more attention a brand has, the more interested consumers will be in their products.  Ducre also mentions that though crowdsourcing, or getting input from people to make something better, seems to be a new thing that’s just catching on, IBM has been doing that for a long time.

“You’ll see more social technologies, leveraging all of the social collaboration tools is a must,” Ducre stated.

• A genuinely social business

IBM prides itself with being a genuinely social business.  Every IBM employee is given social media guidelines, which they use to become the “voice of IBM.”  Jeff Schick, Vice President of Social Software at IBM, explains that being social doesn’t need to be complicated or painful.  You just need a software that’s reliable and easy to use without an instructional manual.

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Social Data meets Analytics

How does IBM make it all happen?  Why analytics of course.

image source: SiliconANGLE

According to Les Rechan, General Manager and Business Analytics with IBM, the key to data analytics is taking advantage of all the data whether it is structured or not, then deliver all the analytics – from descriptive to cognitive – to get to the verticals.

“Take the capability that we got (all data, all analytics, all solutions) and apply it. When you think about analytics (social, mobile, cloud), we’re looking at systems of engagement, presenting information to people on the front line that could come from many heterogeneous data sources. We want to be able to bring that together – and we have solutions that do that – and then bring it together for that user and for that particular problem,” Rechan stated.

• Turning data into cash: Real-time winning

And one of the key factors in social data is real time.  Harriet Fryman, Director of Big Data & Analytics at IBM, explains that though people realize that there is great value in Big Data and analytics, some of them fail to understand that the power relies in real time analytics.  Combining real time analytics and social data can get brands to better understand what consumers want.

In other words, brands can get an insight of what consumers are after and offer great deals to get them to buy more of it, even if they don’t really need them.

Fryman states that social data can help brands “get the sentiment in the market, tie it to the internal data,” and use that to build reputation or make a real time offer.

photo credit: kevin dooley via photopin cc