data management Archives - Successful Blog

The amount of data that is created and owned by businesses has increased dramatically over the past few years, and this has made data management a more challenging task for many companies.

However, there are new technologies available to enable businesses to get the most out of their data, one of which is big data.

Here is a look at how adopting a big data solution can be beneficial to your business:

Overview of Big Data Management

Big data management refers to the act of organizing, administrating and governing large quantities of data, both structured and unstructured.

It aims to improve the quality and accessibility of data, so that it can be used for big data analytics and business intelligence.

With an effective big data management strategy, businesses can locate valuable data in large pools of semi-structured and unstructured data from a wide range of sources, including system logs, call detail records and social media websites.

Benefits of Implementing a Big Data System

Better Customer Service

To get the most out of your big data system, you need to stay focused on the big data bottom line.

A big data solution can help drive up sales by facilitating better customer service. With such a system in place, your employees will be able to perform real-time checks on your customers and provide helpful advice on products and services.

Additionally, big data can unite the physical and digital shopping spheres by allowing you and your employees to provide useful information about your physical stores through the Internet.

Enhance Product Development and Marketing

Another benefit of big data is that it enables you to gain a better understanding of your target consumers’ behavior and perception of your brand and products, and segment them according to demographic groups and geographical locations.

With such information, you will be able to develop products and services that can meet their needs more effectively, as well as fine-tune your marketing campaign to achieve better results.

Improve Decision Making

By implementing a big data solution, you will have easy access to accurate information on almost every area of your business, ranging from operations to product inventory. This enables you to identify problems and make well-informed decisions to improve various aspects of your business.

Big data also makes information more easily available to your employees, which can help them perform their duties more competently.

Big Data Trends in 2014

New solutions are constantly being developed to improve the effectiveness, efficiency and security of big data systems. As such, you can expect to see significant changes in big data trends in 2014.

According to expert predictions, these changes may include the transitioning of big data from hype to actionable intelligence, increasing use of data by traditional companies to generate revenue, growing importance of visualization tools as an IT expenditure and greater implementation of predictive analytics and machine learning.

In order to get maximum value from your big data solution, you need to make sure that you have the right combination of big data analytics tools, processes and people.

Photo credit: Forbes.com

About the Author: John McMalcolm is a freelance writer who writes on a wide range of subjects, from Cloud computing to social media marketing.

By Marcela De Vivo

An adept social media manager knows that no social platform or social signal is truly insignificant, which is why we often create multiple accounts on every platform that exists, or has the potential to become the “next big thing.” Currently sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ dominate the market, but collating data from these four sites alone can be a full-time job.

Every campaign has its own methods of tracking and analyzing data, but ultimately every social media manager longs for a tool that will not only allow you to aggregate various metrics in a convenient way, but also gives you the data you need to discern what is your most engaging content, how it applies to your target audience, and how it calls them to act.

Long no more–that tool does exist, in the form of social media analytics dashboards. Analytics dashboards are designed to organize information in an easy-to-access and comprehensible presentation. You can gain all the valuable statistics from every social media network, all in one place, along with the data that can help you measure the quality and effectiveness of your campaign, thereby increasing your overall productivity on social media.

With a number of widgets and add-ons, dashboards allow you to gain specific information without having to visit an endless amount of sites to access them. Managing your social media output requires a lot of legwork but dashboards will decrease the amount of time finding the data and giving you the time to work with it.

If you are a social media manager and you do not have a social media dashboard, this will revolutionize the way you do your work for five valuable and empowering reasons:

1. Time Management

It’s vital for a business or website to keep their finger on the pulse of social media, but this often requires having multiple campaigns running on multiple networks, which can be incredibly time consuming. Though the small actions of logging in, tracking activity, switching back and forth to compare metrics, and engaging with customers might only take a few minutes or even seconds each, those actions quickly rack up.

A social media dashboard like Google Analytics or Cyfe can greatly reduce the amount of time you spend because you have access to each network, and each network’s data. This gives you quick and simple answers to questions such as “what’s working” and “when were we the most effective?”

Besides having access to a variety of networks such as Facebook and Pinterest, you can also create multiple dashboards to control each campaign or client separately, if need be. And when it’s time to present reports to clients or to your manager, outputting the data is as simple as a quick export.

2. Visual Comparisons

With a dashboard, the easy aggregation allows you to see all of the statistics regarding a campaign, which can be displayed in a variety of graphs and charts (another great feature for reporting).

Image Courtesy of koozai.com

Along with the stunning amount of graphs, dashboards like Cyfe gives you the ability to track what works with customers such as the number of conversions, likes, re-tweets, etc. Another time saving tool for social media managers is that most of the brand management data on social media dashboards can not only be exported but also be transferred to a hard copy at the end of a time period

Dashboards simply give you the opportunity to monitor your reputation around the clock worldwide. Kristi Hines’ piece on Cyfe, Get your Business Analytics Fix in One Dashboard, goes in depth about the usefulness of dashboards and widgets in regards to your business (definitely worth checking out).

3. Collaboration

An essential feature of social media dashboards is the ease of sharing; this hands you the ability to collaborate with others in your company. Most dashboards empower you with a feature to share the information no matter what the distance is.

This not only makes it easy to work together with someone on a campaign but increases the effectiveness by giving them the opportunity to see all of the valuable aggregated data. Instead of spending time over the phone or e-mailing, your co-worker can simply just access the dashboard and have all of the data right in front of them.

4. Tracking Your Competitors

A very important quality to social media dashboards is the ability to track your competitors’ data. It’s time consuming enough tracking your own data, so why spend your valuable time tracking theirs? With a dashboard, however, you can monitor widgets that can show you their statistics on social media platforms just the same as yours, and that are just as easy to view and compare.

You can also install widgets to view their SEO data like their MozStats and view their Alexa rating. This gives you the information you need to compare where they stand in regard to your campaign without setting you back in terms of time and resources.

5. Not just for Social Sites

Managing social media doesn’t just stop at Twitter and Facebook. It is important to have access to all of the benefits that the internet has for business.

Image Courtesy of iacquire.com

Widgets that track your Google Adwords data along with AB testing give you the opportunity to see how customers engage with your business and allow you to track what is most appealing for them. Finance information from Paypal and Salesforce are all available, so you have access to invoices and balances from a variety of sources.

Stop wishing about a quick and easy social analytics dashboard and set yours up this week. Searching will help you find a myriad of tools to get you started.

How are you tracking your company’s data?

Marcela De Vivo is the CEO of Gryffin Media, an online marketing agency specializing in helping companies integrate their social media, paid, and content marketing efforts. She loves to research different ways of growing online, and sharing her knowledge. In her spare time, she’s a yoga and meditation junkie. Follow her on Facebook.