Thanks to Vaz Balasingham for an interesting link to an Economist article published last year on “Mining Social Networks” - how big corporations, like telcos, that focus just on “big profit” customers using big data analytics, could well be using a flawed short-term-only strategy. Larger business effects (and hence business profites) can be caused by “big influence” customers - an extreme example of which is something like the Oprah Winfrey Show’s book recommendations. Large numbers of smaller influence groups occur everywhere, and this is of course where “social networks” provide rich sources of information (and possibly opportunities for the marketeers to influence trends…).

The role of CEP in all this is quite simple: the analytics themselves can be data-based or event-based, but the requirement to act (i.e. make an event-driven decision) is a real-time business action. The article mentions:

The trick, then, is to identify such trendsetting subscribers and keep them on board with special discounts and promotions.

Or rather, to make sure they have the attention of your business. And the attention span of the business has to be real-time, not batch-time, so that when a “lose customer” event is predicted the appropriate mitigation is carried out!

Notes:

1. TIBBR, TIBCO’s own social networking technology, can also be a source of data for analytics. In particular, text-based analytics such as those provided by Netrics might be useful to indicate trends…

2. The article also had a very prescient quote: …societies with longstanding and strong social and business ties abroad weather change well. In relatively closed countries, like Egypt, rapid shifts in social networks can trigger upheaval…

Philip Howard at Bloor penned an interesting piece last week on the Future of Data Mining, covering the proposed IBM takeover of SPSS and what it means for the data mining tool space.

Philip’s comments included “Tibco acquired Insightful last year following a previous acquisition of Spotfire. And Tibco is not a tiddler. The company also has a leading event processing engine. Put these facts together with Tibco’s focus on the predictive enterprise and you have a company that has the potential to fill the gap left by IBM’s acquisition of SPSS.“

In possibly related news, TIBCO has joined the Data Mining Group, developers of the PMML standard, with both analytics and CEP groups represented.