In addition companies have a baseline measurement of how their customers perceive them from both a positive and negative standpoint. The downside if social marketing analytics is the cost for integrating these BI systems with legacy systems (Raab, 2010) and the ramp-up for learning their advanced features (Tsai, 2009). The data quality of these systems is excellent as they are more attuned to encapsulating and summarizing the data so it can be quickly used within a BI system and in marketing campaigns. In terms of data privacy, the systems are as secured as the networks of the companies using them. The level of security and authentication needed to gain access to these systems is determined by their level of system administration-based options defined.

Finally there are challenges and risks to using social marketing analytics applications, the greatest being that of not correctly capturing and using the data, or worse, misinterpreting the data and making incorrect decisions as a result. Another challenge is the increasingly complexity of analytics applications (Tyagi, 2010). All of these factors together make the use of social marketing analytics applications...

The lack of adoption of BI tools in an organization will also make it difficult or a challenge to get this advanced type of analytics adoption into mainstream decision making. Despite these risks and challenges however this is an exceptionally effective area of BI, as it provides insights into how a company is perceived in real-time and proves invaluable guidance in defining marketing strategies.
References

Lawrence, R., Melville, P., Perlich, C., Sindhwani, V., Meliksetian, S., Hsueh, P., & Liu, Y.. (2010). Social Media Analytics. OR-MS Today, 37(1), 26.

SAS; SAS (R) Customer Link Analytics to Boost Customer Relationships. (2010, March). Marketing Weekly News,16

David Raab. (2010). Marketing Infrastructure for a Customer-Driven World: Marketers must adjust to changing expectations and communication challenges. Information Management, 20(1), 36.

Tsai, J. (2009, July). Taking The Measure of Social Media. Customer Relationship Management, 13(7), 17-18.

Tyagi, P.. (2010). Webnography: A New Tool to Conduct Marketing Research. Journal of…