Enabling Social Commerce : Big Data Analytics with Special Reference to Social Media Analytics

The increased popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIN has opened opportunities for new business models for electronic commerce. This is referred to as social commerce. Social commerce involves Web 2.0 social media technologies and infrastructure to support online interactions and user contributions to assist in the acquisition of products and services. The power of social commerce is primarily due to the large number of members participating in social networks. The interactions and contributions in social networking play a key role in affecting the attitude and behavior of the user. Therefore, taking advantage of social networking is the most essential attribute of social commerce. Information is a fundamental component in social commerce with an emphasis on user/consumer generated content and lays the foundation for decision making. Social media websites are collectively responsible for adding massive chunk of data and unlike other data sources, information produced and collected by social media websites are unstructured. It is also enormous in volume that it is not humanly possible to collect, process, and manage such a huge set of unstructured data. These insights require beyond the limitations of traditional enterprise data warehouse (EDWs) and business intelligence (BI) software, which pose significant limitations. Big data analytics solutions address these challenges head on. Big data analytics is the key to unlocking the insights from all data types and it enables to analyze all structured, semi-structured and unstructured customer data together.The paper outlines the I-model of social commerce and describes the big data analytics technology with special reference to social media analytics. Also cited is real time case study of Walmart Inc., in social media analytics