mike manuel

So two interesting articles worth pointing to here, also an opportunity for all social media marketers to consider as we march toward a new year: First off, earlier this month, IBM’s Rob Ash posted this great piece on business analytics, and how various companies are trying to squeeze more value and insights from the growing piles of data that they sit on. And then there’s this second story from Spencer Ante at BusinessWeek, which coincidentally, is about IBM too, and how the company’s putting a lot more muscle and money behind the hiring of data analysts.

While both stories are about Big Blue and big business, the big opportunity is front and center — company’s today have access to friggin mountains of data and intelligence, and those that can make the most sense of it, stand to gain considerably from it. Period. This is particularly true for social media marketing teams who are increasingly responsible for making sense of a messy, yet amazingly insightful social web. Those teams that can collect the right data AND wrap the right performance analytics around it, will be the champions of the standout programs we talk about this time next year. This is why I think stronger web analytics, tighter measurement models and better intelligence tools will be such an important part of this discipline’s maturity in 2010 (a topic for a separate post).