Mining Social Data

Scott Arenson VP, Dialogue GolinHarris sarenson@golinharris.com 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