If you are an avid Netflix user like me you may have watched the Netflix original series “House of Cards.”   There is a quote in one episode from a character that accurately encapsulates the power of social media: “Remember, these days, when you’re talking to one person, you’re talking to a thousand.” So with that quote in mind one can wonder, what is social media saying about my class? What about my university? Fortunately, there are emerging technology platforms that are taking these types of questions to task, and are providing valuable insight into what students and customers are saying on social media platforms.

One of these technology platforms is offered by SAP and their platform is based on their SAP HANA product.  SAP HANA is an in-memory, column-oriented, relational database management system that is changing the ERP and “Big Data” landscape.  HANA forgoes the traditional hard drive for data storage and instead stores all of its data in RAM.  This allows for data to be accessed faster, and allows for data to be safely compressed by a factor of 10.  The speed and data storage increases provided by HANA make it a powerful tool for analyzing data of all kinds.  So with HANA and the help of some programming tools customer sentiment can be harvested from social media sources and then analyzed in near real time with business intelligence tools.

The results and insights from this type of analysis could be invaluable to an organization.  Instructors could re-evaluate the instruction methods, and universities could reshape their messaging campaigns to ensure that their target audiences are reached with a clear message.  The possibilities and benefits for this type of analysis in the future are immense as the importance of and dependency on social media increases across younger generations.

So hopefully in the near future if you wonder “What is Twitter saying about my class?” your answer will only be a few mouse clicks away.