Structuring Data: ERP & Social Media

It’s no secret that companies are using social media as a business strategy. But how are they capturing the data that they receive from tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn? Some companies are hesitant to spend too much time with social media because its hard to capture unstructured data.

The question is then, can unstructured data become structured?

Social media tools are finally being integrated into complex ERP applications, which will allow for easy and fast communications between businesses and customers. The largest benefit of this integration is clear – organizing and storing useful data that can be used for business strategy and analysis. Social media data can still be lost, but ERP social media applications is an evolutionary step for businesses.

ERP vendors were working on something called global search prior to this and it will likely help them with the ERP integration. Global search is a transactional search that allows you to type in an order number or customer number and then you can see every related transaction. If you can associate unstructured data such as social media with those related numbers, you’ll be able to organize and match that information. Eventually you will be able to create structured data out of unstructured data, giving value to something that today isn’t being valued.

“What they’re trying to do is to capture a lot of this unstructured communication which goes on between the customers and companies. So then you get all the traditional data from the ERP system but you also have captured the social media communications as well,” says industry analyst Kevin Prouty of Aberdeen Group.

And why not incorporate what the next generation of workers feel comfortable with? Those using ERP applications for the first time will have deep social media experience because they are already using tools such as Facebook and Twitter in their personal lives. But the best is yet to come.

“So many junior employees today use social media for communications in their personal lives and I think that has to be a bigger part of their professional lives as well. These workers have these skills so you might as well take advantage of them…The second generation, which is probably a year or two off, will bring fully integrated social media capabilities, and that’s where you’re going to track and integrate all of that unstructured communications with all the related transactions that are going on,” Prouty said.

Eventually this kind of social media integration with ERP systems could also make its way into other enterprise applications such as CRM because it could give companies much more customer information. The merger of social media and ERP will allow companies to get much more from their data, and social media apps will become one of the key features that vendors highlight when selling their systems to companies.