Putting a Value on Unstructured Data
February 21, 2014
The conventional wisdom is that the data derived from social media has great value. It is fast overtaking traditional media, with 70% of adults in the US using Facebook, and 63% of all Facebook users visiting the site at least once a day. That doesn’t even begin to address Twitter, LinkedIn or niche social networks like Ravelry.
What users share on social networks is unstructured data, and IT’s challenge is to extract business value from that unstructured data. But what is that data worth? Loraine Lawson considered the question in her recent blog post “Do Businesses Really Value Social Media Data?” for IT BusinessEdge.
Lawson notes that Dun and Bradstreet has entered into a partnership with business analytics vendor FirstRain that will allow D&B to integrate unstructured social data into its existing enterprise data products at no additional cost. Forbes’ Ben Kepes reported this development, and his column sparked Lawson to wonder,
“Social media data that has been integrated and given to clients…for free? As Kepes notes, that could be interpreted as ‘an admission that enterprises aren’t buying into the idea of unstructured data’s value proposition on its own.’”
On the other hand, Oracle will be happy to sell you a solution to leverage social media data. It’s clear the marketplace hasn’t quite reached consensus on the value of unstructured data.
Laura Abrahamsen, February 21, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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