“Big Data” is a term that means a lot of things to a lot of different people. But the value proposition is generally the same: Turning huge mountains of data into actionable insights. Enter Salesforce.com Radian6 Insights, a new SaaSoffering that aims to deliver on the promise of turning social media into highly valuable and actionable business intelligence.

Rob Begg, VP of Marketing for Salesforce Radian6, says that Radian6 Insights represents a new wave in social media management. We’ve gone from visibility into the so-called firehose of social media, into engagement, into analytics, and now into the ability to draw and analyze real-time demographic, sentiment and intent data from the whole spectrum of social sources and turn the actual metrics into real, well, insights.

Begg boasts that Radian6 Insights brings what would have traditionally been the province of focus groups, surveys, and other market research into a truly real-time context, shaving weeks or months off the process while also giving insight into a more candid discussion of your product or service.

Radian6 Insights offers those demographic, sentiment and intent analytics right out of the box. But for insights outside of that scope, Radian6 is opening a new marketplace for BI and analytics providers to sell their own uniquely-targeted solutions.

The Radian6 Insights marketplace at launch will feature offerings from partners  Klout, OpenCalais, Clarabridge for text sentiment analysis, Lymbix for emotion and tone classification, PeekAnalytics for social audience measurement,Solariat for social intention analysis, and OpenAmplify for customer service insights. Intriguingly, Begg says that he expects the real “magic” to happen when customers combine these partner products and come up with really unique analytics methods.

In short, Radian6 Insights is a way to crunch the entire social media landscape and turn “I love my iPhone” into something you can actually build a business on. It may not run Hadoop under the hood (I asked) and it may use Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and so on instead of existing data warehouses, but that sounds like Big Data to me. Also of note is that it helps Salesforce.com up its social media management game even as Oracle works hard and shells out on acquisitions to do the same.

Radian6 Insights is included in the base Radian6 social media management package, which offers subscriptions starting at $600/month. Partner solutions start at around $60.