**Author: Suraj Arukil**

2011 was noted as the year that demonstrated the “power of the human emotion.” It was the year where human emotion exhibited itself through mediums that go beyond satisfaction surveys. With emergence of more sophisticated social media , advanced mobile technologies and highly user friendly computing platforms, people world over have found new mediums to express , collaborate and even bring down governments. The emergence of “human collaboration” and its associated platforms will be the most watched trends in the coming years, here are a sample pick of my favorite emerging business -technologies.

Social Media and the Emergence of Big Data 

Social Media, has emerged as the biggest go-to business model in 2011. The increasingly large amount of data that many social media websites like Twitter, Facebook etc. generates have created large scale challenges and wonderful opportunities.

Social Media is now a huge kingdom and data (big data) of every size are its subjects. Simply put, every action undertaken on the social media generates data and every data can cause a business action or inaction. According to IBM – “Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data–so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone.” Big data (or data generated from social Media) is large and is expanding at a pace that out beats the best economies in the world.

Organizations have started focusing on driving customer experience, segmentation and sentiments through social media inputs. For example large organizations are constantly checking the customer feedback on its social media pages to understand market sentiments and feedback. This data and changes in the data is now driving customer centric programs like demographic based advertisements and marketing programs. Companies are also using advanced complex algorithms to check fraud, do sentiment analysis etc.

What’s more, every reaction of the user is analyzed for sentiment and large scale user sentiment leads to specific decisions. So when you cuss on Facebook and declare to the world that your meal was bad, or when you tweeted that your friend brought a new Mercedes on getting a promotion – it generates an equal or un-equal data relation, which when monitored leads to either a business action or inaction.

2012 will see the emergence of Social Media, Big Data and the trend indicates large scale investments in data cccessibility and storage (Hadoop, IBM Watson, GreenPlum) which in turn will lead to newer technologies in data segmentation and reporting.

2012 will also see the emergence of concepts and technology development around areas like Social BI and Social CRM.

I, for one can’t wait!