There are worse places to get stranded.

Hiking trails and winding roads are framed by fall colors at SAS' Cary, NC, headquarters campus.

When Tuesday’s “Great Lakes Cyclone” (or the snappier “Chiclone“) canceled my flight home from SAS’ sprawling headquarters campus in Cary, N.C., my first thought was: what about that quadruped I adopted the day before? Sure, my husband is there to kittysit but I am missing all the fun of watching that furball figure out his new surroundings.

Discovery is a fascinating thing. While this little bluepoint baby was learning how to push buttons of my very rattled resident cat in Chicago, I was soaking up my own revelations during SAS’ Media Day, the precursor to SAS’ Premier Business Leadership Series under way this week in Las Vegas. Some 600 attendees are expected to turn out to learn how companies like Chico’s FAS and Harrah’s Entertainment are exploiting data analytics to make better business decisions.

Interest in “unstructured data” – that being information generated by video, voice, in-store encounters with customers and dialogues occurring across social networks – is on the rise. Companies are driven to harness this intelligence to better understand and engage consumers. Only 5% of data is structured, Jim Davis, SAS senior vice president and chief marketing officer, told about 30 editors and analysts before the whole group jetted off to Las Vegas. That leaves a boatload of untapped (un-understood?) data out there.

The desire to exploit unstructured data is not all that new. More than five years ago, Saks EVP and CIO Bill Franks talked about mining unstructured data to identify merchandising opportunities. “Right now, we throw a spear in the darkness and if we hear a scream, we know we hit the enemy,” he said. The challenge with unstructured data is figuring out how to collect, clean, categorize, analyze and apply it in useful ways. This is harder than extracting data generated by transactional systems. And if you’re in a highly distributed environment, good luck with that.

The vast majority (75%) of companies do not know where in the social media universe their most valuable customers are discussing their brand; 31% do not measure effectiveness of social media; only 23% use social media analytic tools; and a scant 7% integrate social media into marketing activities. These are among findings that surfaced when 2,100 Harvard Business Review magazine subscribers were surveyed on behalf of SAS. “The New Conversation: Taking Social Media from Talk to Action” was released today.

Over lunch in the SAS cafeteria, Chico’s CIO Gary King told me he has interest in unstructured data but the focus on analytics now is on campaign management and cultivating the online shopper. Although online shoppers generate just 7% to 8% of sales at Chico’s, they represent 3x the spend of in-store shoppers, when viewed in terms of lifetime value.

“This idea that a customer only wants to interact with you in one channel is falling by the wayside,” he told editors and analysts at Tuesday’s Media Day.

Chico’s, which also sells under the Black House | White Market apparel and Soma intimates brands, has gathered useful insights on fit and quality via Facebook. King said the company also works hard to engage influential fashion bloggers by reaching out and emphasizing differentiating factors of concepts and merchandise.

Just announced today: To help retail marketers enhance customer engagement on Twitter, SAS will launch its SAS Conversation Center in January 2011. The software module, which complements its Social Media Analytics application, captures Tweets in real time and identifies the most influential posts based on metrics like volume of content created by the Tweet author and how often their content is perpetuated by others in the Twitter community.

Two more takeaways from SAS Media Day:

• A bus tour of SAS’ 350-acre campus where 4,600 people work demonstrates there are companies that care for their workers. On this beautifully landscaped property, employees and their families have access to many fitness options (swimming pool, tennis courts, gym, hiking trails, soccer fields), three cafeterias serving healthy fare, subsidized day care, two Montessori schools and a health facility where you can get minor surgery done on your lunch hour. You can even get your car detailed without leaving the grounds. An army of landscapers, custodial workers and two resident artists are on staff – not outsourced – to maintain an idyllic environment. This feeling of “calm” made my extended stay far more bearable than being stuck in, oh let’s say, Bayonne, N.J.

• A popular new delicacy in Texas is deep-fried butter nuggets. Deep. Fried. Butter. That most definitely trumps the cheese curds I discovered in Door County, Wis., last year. Not really relevant to business analytics but Laura Brumley, my indefatigable SAS liaison from the Lone Star State, enlightened me so I am compelled to share. Come to think of it, butter nuggets may actually have a significant role in data analytics for retail. Apparel retailers trying to master size optimization and refine pre-packs can analyze the popularity of butter nuggets in a given geographic location, and …poof! That’ll tell you how many size 2s you need for a San Francisco store location and how many size 14s you need in Dallas. Elvis, a fan of Las Vegas and deep fried Twinkies, would approve. So would Atticus, who was waiting for me when I got home.

Atticus