It’s no secret – the influence of social media channels is large, and growing.  Opportunities abound for companies willing to engage consumers via these channels.  Perhaps you’ve seen the Old Spice Guy videos on YouTube, in which he personally responded to Tweets from various celebrities and others?  Yeah, well Old Spice body wash sales DOUBLED as a result.

Still not convinced of the ROI of social media?  Check out this video by Socialnomics:

Some staggering statistics, no?  So what does all this say about us as individuals?  There’s no denying we are social creatures.  Something fundamental about our humanity drives us to connect with each other.  But what are the implications of this for the organizations we spend most of our time in, plying our trade?  Human beings are social . . . organizations are made up of human beings . . . ergo, organizations are social.

Organizations are more than just the brick and mortar, the equipment, the computers, the data, even the human resources, alone.  There is something about an organization, taken together as a whole, that is greater than the sum of its parts.  As social media continues to prove an effective channel to engage consumers, the question must be asked, can these channels help a company become more intelligent?  What does the astronomical rise of social media tell us about how people relate, connect and share information, and can organizations leverage this power for their own good?  It is our contention that the “intangible” assets of an organization – those which make it a living, breathing, intelligent organism – provide a real competitive advantage, if harnessed and leveraged properly.  This is what the “knowledge management” movement has been trying to get its hands around for so long.  If what makes an organization unique and competitive in the marketplace is its knowledge, so the argument goes, then this knowledge must be strategically and actively managed.

The question is not if, but how.  How can the principles and the tools of social media be used to help unleash latent knowledge and skill within an organization, to help it become more efficient, more effective – more competitive?  Further, how can business intelligence tools be used to help organizations measure and highlight the knowledge intangibles of an organization – to help drive innovation and to help managers make better decisions, faster?

James Kobielus at Information Management has identified some possibilities:

• Social BI interactivity: Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, and kindred models of user-centric development, publishing, and subscription tools will move into the heart of the interactive BI user experience.  We’ll also see more solutions that enable reports, dashboards, charts, and other BI views to be embedded in social media.
• Social BI content marts: We can expect to see more BI solutions that support extension and/or replacement of traditional data marts with vast user-populated pools of complex, mashed-up, subject-oriented analytic content and applications.
• Social BI information integration: Users will be able to choose from a growing range of BI solutions that support discovery, capture, monitoring, mining, classification, and predictive analysis on growing streams of social media content, much of it coming in real-time from both public and private sources.

Smart companies see themselves as living, breathing organisms, and seek to leverage their knowledge assets to compete in the marketplace.  The social media tidal wave is here, indeed.  Are you swimming with the current?