Companies today in all spheres from media to healthcare are struggling with the "Network Effect" phenomenon as I call it. The age of social networking has matured from zero to reality in a short span of five years, which has ushered in the "Network Effect".

What is the "Network Effect". Simply put it is the way we connect with each other as people today. One simple example is the movies, in the past few months movie producers have started looking at RSS feeds, Twitter and other social media avenues to advertise their movie and provide additional promotions to the target audience. Why?

The advent of text messages , Twitter etc have provided a channel for people to communicate their views and opinions on any subject. Such a trend has shown its impact on movies - for example last summer's release of "Transformers" did not succeed in generating interest in the young adult community as the movie did not receive rave reviews from first day or first week viewers and most had negative sentiments about the movie. On the same note, the current success of Avatar, is highly attributable to the genius of James Cameron, but the network effect of people recommending others to see the movie for its astounding technical effects and causing a mass attraction to the theaters shows the effect of "Network Effect".

We will continue to see the influence of "Network Effect" in the coming months and years. We will see in the coming days more discussions on this subject.

Year 2010 will be the year of Social Analytics in Business Intelligence. The prime reason for this thought stems from the fact that organizations have heavily invested in CRM, BI and all possible solutions to better manage themselves and their customers. But what is the use of all this data, if you cannot connect to the real world? i.e what do people talk about you, your products, services and your competition? how can you really understand the "network effect" that your customers will bring to your business?

As we move more closer to connecting the dots, the largest gap will lie in the social analytics arena. One can understand that the data volumes we are discussing is extremely large in nature, complex to process, more complex to decipher value from and extremely volatile in nature. This is exactly why I'm looking at Social Analytics being the "next BIg thing in BI".

Who are the companies that are investing into product development in this are, there are a few that come to mind, but I will hold off on revealing them in this blog.

Over the next few days, this blog will focus on this theme and expound this further.