The Digital Enterprise - Part 3 - Leveraging Social Media

Continuing, off our discussion from Part 2, about using social media data in the context of enterprise applications. Let first look at the big picture of how social media analytics can be used in the context of an enterprise.

We talked earlier about the idea of leveraging the fact that end users are increasing using social media accounts like Facebook to login-in to company websites. Such a login can provide a trigger for requesting the user for sharing his/her social media profile details. These details can then be stored off and used as for offline analytics, to infer more about the end user. Getting to know the end user better in this fashion can then be translated into, targeted ad content as well as personalization for the user, to suite his current and future needs.

Refer to the architecture diagram below, which I will walk through in the discussion below:

1. We see the end user / customer accessing a company (say Insurance Company's) website or mobile app
2. The user is prompted to login to the company website using social account like Facebook account
3. After a 3-legged OAUTH 2 based authentication success, the company web app receives the login success callback.
4. Inside the login success callback for say facebook, a quick async ajax call ie POST is made to the Social Media Analytics Package (SMAP), which hosts our analytics application
5. The entire user profile data (in this case Facbook user profile) is persisted in a document oriented database like MongoDB
6. Similarly user profile data from twitter, linked-in, google-plus, etc can also be stored in the same MongoDB. Periodically,batches can be run,which will merge such aggregated social data based on keys such as Name, DOB, email addresses etc. Over a period of time, the Insurance company should have aggregated data for several customers and potentials, who have willingly registered on their website.
7. Now the same Social Media Analytics Package (SMAP) application can act as a provider for Clients which query for additional information about prospects and customers. Such queries can be issued and responded to over REST interface. Thin client browsers as well as mobile apps can access user profile information over REST interfaces
8. The SMAP REST interfaces can also be used by existing within enterprise CRM services, which can combine this social media user data with in-house CRM data, to produce consolidated profiles of users and prospects

The above architecture and high level design can be used to effectively, leverage social media based user profile information, to augment enterprise's own CRM databases.

On a side note, the same SMAP and MongoDB database can also be used to store website-level analytics data from Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, etc. Such data can be aggregated across large time periods to analyse a variety of user's trends and habits.

Cheers!