Courtesy of AG Beat

Most small businesses don't know what social business intelligence is or how to use it, but Rony Ross highlights 7 things you should know.

What is Social BI?

For years, we have talked about Big Data and Business Intelligence, and the two converge when discussing Social Business Intelligence (BI) which is a term that refers to intelligence based on data garnered from social networks, and the analysis of that data. Live reports and visualizations of social media activities are pulling data points from all over the web and quantifying businesses' efforts online. Social BI is not just for corporations, however, as small businesses now have access to tools that improve their competitive advantage as well.

A spokesperson for Panorama Software, an international solution for proactive Business Intelligence solutions, offering SQL Server 2012 and Hadoop ready technologies tells AGBeat that "with the online world growing larger every second, we are faced with more and more big data."

"Many marketers, publishers, etc., need to digest that data quickly or risk it becoming irrelevant or snapped up by their competitors," the company added. "Many companies are now looking to Social and Mobile BI solutions to cut down the time between analyzing the data and putting it into action."

Top 7 things most don't know about Social BI

Panorama Software CTO, Rony Ross reveals that companies using Big Data can benefit from Social BI but that the average small to medium sized business commonly does not know the following seven things.

According to Ross:

1. The Average SMB doesn't know that Social BI enables to use the "power of many" in the organization to make faster, better quality decisions.
    
2. That Social BI has a "Social Bar" on screen that displays either the business friends you pre-selected, or the people most relevant to the Business Issue you are investigating.
    
3. That Social BI system suggests to you who are the people in the organization most suitable to cooperate with on a business problem, based on your and their areas of expertise.
    
4. That Social Bi enables users to create online ad-hoc teams to discuss and collaborate on business issues that are unveiled by the BI system.
    
5. That Social BI records the online discussion and the notes about business issues and ties these discussions and notes down to the BI data that generated these discussions so it can be retraced in the future or become a basis for best practice.
    
6. That a Social BI system can suggest to you additional views and reports : "users who have viewed this report also viewed these other reports.."
    
7. That a social BI system can suggest to you the root causes of a problem and save on excruciating drill downs, slices and dices.
    

Businesses now have access to a tremendous amount of data, but having Big Data isn't enough, you must discover ways to use it, drill down, and truly interpret data in a way that all parties in your company can quickly comprehend and take action on.