Bad news travels fast in the age of social media. Just ask Progressive Insurance. So it's hardly surprising to see social media analytics move to the forefront of the corporate agenda.
Enterprise IT has a lead role to play in this strategy. It's not just about overseeing the technology to handle big-data, the lifeblood on which analytics depends -- though having the right systems in place is essential. IT also is called on to ensure that corporate analytics actually deliver what they're supposed to.
How to make analytics work is the theme underlying Internet Evolution's upcoming 7DEE series on "Analytics in the Age of Customer Empowerment," which begins on Tuesday, September 11, at 2:00 p.m. ET, with six more days throughout the month.
The first class kicks off with a focus on what exactly can be measured via social media. Lecturer Jim Sterne, founder of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit and chairman of the Digital Analytics Association, will discuss the potential insights to be gleaned from social media analytics. His aim is to help enterprise IT pros answer questions about what they can measure in order to determine what they should measure.
But there's a lot more for IT professionals to learn about social media analytics. Other classes in the series will cover issues such as choosing the right methodology, determining the role of big-data
in marketing and customer analytics, and predictive analytics. There will also be a session on dealing with negative sentiment on social sites (something Progressive Insurance failed to do effectively).
IT needs this information. Consider what's at stake: As companies turn to social media for crucial marketing information, they're investing heavily in tools and techniques to make sense of the input. A case in point is Procter & Gamble, a company that's quadrupling IT expenditures on analytics, even as the firm cuts back severely in other areas of IT.
Making good on investments in systems, software, storage, cloud services, and expertise supporting analytics requires IT to have a big-picture view of business goals. It also calls for hand-in-glove collaboration with lines of business on the kind of data required to produce the insights needed to advance the corporate agenda.
So tune in and enjoy our new 7DEE series. If we don't says so ourselves, we think we've got a terrific lineup of lecturers and that you'll find it interesting, entertaining, and certainly worthwhile.
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— Mary Jander 
, Executive Editor, Internet Evolution
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