Mining Social Data
Scott Arenson VP, Dialogue GolinHarris [email protected] 213-438-8842
“Data is the New Oil”
Summerland, California (Santa Barbara County), before 1906
- Michael Palmer, 2006
What is information?
• In 2008 Americans consumed 1.3 trillion hours of information averaging 12 hours per day�
• Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes* of information�
• An average person consumers more that 100,000 words and 34 gigabytes of information per day
*1 zettabyte = one million gigabytes
How Much Information 2009�Report on American Consumers
Global Information Industry Center
“Information” can be defined as flows of data created �by and delivered to people.
“The Knowledge Rush” “Unstructured information represents the largest, most current and fastest growing source of knowledge available to businesses and governments world-wide.”
“In these mounds of natural language artifacts often lie the nuggets of knowledge critical for realizing important trends, creating new opportunities, solving problems or preventing disasters.”
Analytics: From Information to Knowledge
• Today – Human analysts sift through oceans of data looking for patterns such as correlations, associations, similarities, and dependencies which are the elements of decisions
• Tomorrow – Web services surface patterns such as correlations, associations, similarities, and dependencies which are the elements of decisions
Why analytics? • Avis analyzed history of
'clicks' on an e-mail and transactional behavior of 880,000 customers
• Created a segmented customer loyalty database – Communicate their “3 minute”
promise – Offer male 25 – 35 year-olds a
convertible during summer months
• Delivered tailor content to 18 million email offers to 880,000 customers
• Avis cut marketing expenses by 50% and increased sales
Defining social data
Essential future skills
• Skill #1: Statistics (Studying)
• Skill #2: Data Munging (Suffering)
• Skill #3: Visualization (Storytelling)
“The sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians… The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill.” - Hal Varian, Google Chief Economist
Where do I start?
Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth. - Archimedes
• Define goals and objectives
• Select measures and metrics
• Target data sources • Leverage social
analytics methods • Deliver the insights
and storytelling
Goals and objectives • Understand clients
marketing and communications goals and objectives
• Top down or bottom up approach? – Solving for X – Gathering market
data for insights
Select measures and metrics
• Volume • Topics • Type • Reach • Sentiment • Opinion • Influence
Target data sources • Google
– Blog search – Trends – News – Maps
• Twitter search • Technorati • YouTube • Wikipedia • Flickr • Foursquare • LinkedData.org • Data.gov
Leverage social analytics methods and tools
Social media monitoring tools
Social Network Analysis
MentionMap
NodeXL
Deliver the insights
• Dashboards • Reports and
memos • Spreadsheets • Data widgets&
gadgets • Rich Infographics
Dashboards, memos & spreadsheets
Data widgets & gadgets
Infographic core components • Visual
– Color coding – Graphics – Reference icons
• Content – Time Frames – Statistics – References
• Knowledge – Facts – Deductions