In the growing world of information governance, organizations are finding that grasping the monolithic amount of unstructured data and information that exists in the social web world is making an already complex process all the more complicated.

From a marketing and communications perspective, social media provides endless benefits by being able to go beyond the traditional boundaries of enterprise communication practices. Of course, for any CIO, my new marketing and communication tricks translate to needing to reorganize information governance policies.

While a large portion of organizations are aware of the strains social media usage can place on an information governance strategy and policy, a shockingly low percentage of organizations are taking advantage of social media analytics to help them with information governance.

An Information Governance strategy requires that data can be looked at from a holistic perspective. Social Media analytics provides several key benefits to the IT professionals in an organization, including:

• Analyzing conversion data: The options offered in measuring conversion data of social media interactions are numerous. From a social media perspective, this can be a resource used by IT professionals to determine which document on their website and other sites are meeting their organization’s policy for archiving. (See Figure 1)

 

• Identifying advocates of, and threats to, corporate online reputation management:By being able to search across various platforms, and understanding how each is set up to operate, IT professionals can look through analytics to determine who is talking about their brand. This is extremely helpful in allowing managers to determine if someone has a strong reputation as an advocate and could possibly be useful in an online campaign as well as identify those who are not acting in accordance with the organizations social media policy.
  • Example: Hashtag Tracking: Within Twitter, one of the most effective ways of getting a large-scale view of who on twitter is talking about your organization is by searching for specific hashtags. A hastag is, basically, a way of categorizing twitter posts. The example image (Figure 2) below was obtained after search for the hashtag #followfriday. As you can see, it is then easy to determine everyone who is discussing this topic.

• Quantifying interactions from media campaigns and social media activity – This is crucial to those organizations who are concentrating some business focus on inbound, or online, marketing. However, this provides value from an Information Governance perspective in several ways as well.  Let’s take a look at some of those causes:
  • Quantifying Traffic Data: For organizations whose Information Governance policy states that social media items are archived in the repository once a certain level of traffic has been reached, Social Media analytics are essential to identifying these specific pages. Social media flow options on website traffic for example, can outline which pages are getting the highest number of hits, and from which social media source they are coming from. (See Figure 3)

  

  Figure 3

  • Tracking Other Data: Another great tool for information governance enforcement within social media analytics comes from various plugins. These plugins offer various features and can be set up as dashboard to help IT workers correctly identify the activity their various corporate social media accounts are receiving on a number of platforms. (See Figure 4)
    

    Figure 4

 

• Establishing a platform for a social CRM strategy: As mentioned in the above example, the various social media platforms, while all different, have their own ways of tracking for specific topics, including companies. This makes it extremely easy for clients/prospects in several ways:
  • Provides a direct line of communication between various members of an organization and customers to gain advantage on feedback, concerns and questions.
  • Studies show that customers, as well as clients, prefer social media communication over other forms of customer service communication.
    

    Figure 5

Obviously, analytics is quickly becoming an extremely high priority for companies as a result of a realization of the volume, velocity and variety of data that could have potential impact on business-decision making. Because of this, it is only a matter of time till Information Governance professionals start harnessing Social Media Analytics in ways that will help them in securing and governing information from Social Media sites.