The speed with which social media spreads ideas and information has led many marketers to place a premium on capturing data in real time. But should real-time data be such a priority?

Real time means different things to different people when the term is used as a proxy for recency. To an evolutionary biologist, real time could mean thousands of years of species development data. To a 911 dispatcher, real time is a few seconds worth of critical information from a telephone call.

What about marketing and advertising? This notion of “relative real time” extends there, too. To a marketing executive, real time may be data necessary to make annual, semi-annual and quarterly budget decisions. Real time to a media buyer may be several weeks of ratings data to understand what target consumers are viewing. To ad networks serving targeted banner ads to web visitors, real time is microseconds.

Ultimately, gathering the most data possible to inform a decision or solve a problem — in the window of time that best suits your need — is more important than having instantaneous data access. And to do that, you need to start with how you’re going to use the data. What do you want to accomplish? What business problem are you trying to solve?

While social data is exciting because it’s abundant and easily accessible, it’s still relatively new for corporations and how they’re integrating the voice of the consumer into business processes. Real-time social data is just another information source to be incorporated into your decision-making process, from problem definition, to research analysis and, ultimately, project execution. Data doesn’t need to come to you any faster than the time frame that process allows you to act on it.

At Networked Insights we help brands analyze social data for improved decision making — daily, weekly and monthly. While access to a rich data set sounds appealing, sometimes more is not better. Rather, understanding the behaviors of your target consumer is the quickest path to achieving marketing success.

Start by analyzing the decision cycles within your organization or department and how you want to engage data. The timeline of that process will determine what, relatively speaking, real time means to you.

And the winner is… human resources. There has been no more widespread adoption of social media benefits across the enterprise than in the process of finding, recruiting, attracting, and keeping top talent. Say it ain’t so – the department that in some companies still relies on time-clocks is leading change?

You want disruptive influence? How about spending less than $200 to fill a position that would have cost $30,000 – $40,000 to fill via traditional recruiting services. Such was a recent experience using LinkedIn. This single tool has provided both enormous efficiencies in traditional hiring processes (promoting openings, finding candidates, screening applicants, checking referrals,) and massive cost savings (recruiters, job boards & newspaper ads, HR staffing). It is almost single-handedly killing the job board industry.

Then there are the social media tools that help HR stay current with salary trends. Glassdoor.com leverages the newfound willingness that people have towards sharing their pay information and general opinions about their employer. The implication for companies is twofold: 1) a quick and easy way to access highly specialized and regionalized pay data; 2) an opportunity to get a different perspective on the ever changing workplace culture. Both were difficult pieces of data to get previously.

And one of the newest trends in HR is to use social media participation itself as a qualifier for potential new hires. Brazencarreerist exists to connect companies to talented bloggers on the premise that individuals with the discipline, assertiveness, and confidence to regularly publish their opinions on the web will translate into a highly effective workforce.

So while customer service, product development, and marketing functions all are still trying to figure out where to tie-in to the social media madness, HR has found the biggest and most consistent ROI thus far. HR winning a race to be progressive?? It really is a new world.