10 Ways to Discover Social Media Content When brainstorming about what kinds of content to create and share in social media, you need not look any further for inspiration than social media channels themselves. Colleagues who communicate with customers every day can also provide excellent insight. Let’s take a closer look at how to uncover the important issues your community is ready and willing to discuss with you. 1. Ask Your Customers Directly Your customers are your best source of intelligence. 2. Your sales team spends their time talking to customers and prospects. 3. Customer service and technical support reps know what the weak points are in your products and marketing materials. 4. While asking your customers direct questions is one way to get information from them, following them on Twitter and other social media platforms is a way to find out what’s really on their minds. 5. LinkedIn Groups can be a great source of content ideas. 6. 7. 8. What kinds of questions are people asking online in your industry? 9. 10.
Study: Social media is 'brain candy' - Vote for the best company in Austin's business competition ACBJ archive Researchers at Harvard say that social media is brain candy for those who use it. The study comes as the deadline nears for nominations to participate in the Social Madness competition which will honor companies doing outstanding work in social networking. Staff Silicon Valley Business Journal A new study from Harvard says the reason that Facebook, Twitter and other social media are so popular and addictive is that they pleasantly stimulate the same part of the brain as when people eat food, get money or have sex. The researchers found that people simply like to talk about themselves and social media outlets provide a very effective way to do that. The researchers at Harvard asked test subjects hooked up to an MRI machine questions about their own opinions and some about other people's opinions. They found the brain was strongly engaged when the test subjects talked about themselves, and less engaged when talking about someone else.
fredmcclimans.com 5 QUESTIONS with Gnip Inc. CEO Jud Valeski Boulder-based Gnip Inc. specializes in gathering data from public social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and providing real-time content to a variety of firms in industries such as social media monitoring, business intelligence, government and finance. CEO Jud Valeski spoke with the Camera recently about the company's current state, competition and direction. The following has been edited for clarity and space. 1. What are some of the biggest challenges in collecting this data? All of these different providers, all of these different consumers of the content use all of their own protocols and formats to communicate outward and inward to consumers. There's also a volume of content challenge, which is actually a bigger one. 2. There's this social cocktail and there are obviously a variety of different sources and a variety of different providers. ... 3. It's both a blessing and a curse. ... 4. We're 35 people now. 5. There's also a "what's old is new again" (shift).
Jasper Soft eBook Five Levels of Embedded Bi PDF 16098 State Street’s Chief Scientist on How to Tame Big Data Using Semantics Semantic databases are the next frontier in managing big data, says State Street's David Saul. Financial institutions are accumulating data at a rapid pace. Between massive amounts of internal information and an ever-growing pool of unstructured data to deal with, banks' data management and storage capabilities are being stretched thin. The semantic data model associates a meaning to each piece of data to allow for better evaluation and analysis, Saul notes, adding that given their ability to analyze relationships, semantic databases are particularly well-suited for the financial services industry. "Our most important asset is the data we own and the data we act as a custodian for," he says. Semantic technology, notes Saul, is based on the same technology "that all of us use on the World Wide Web, and that's the concept of being able to hyperlink from one location to another location. Using a semantic database, each piece of data has a meaning associated with it, says Saul. More Insights
Decomposing Twitter (Database Perspective) Twitter - one of the latest and hottest Web 2.0 trends used by millions of users around the world every day. How does it manage the enormous data produced by its users? This article reviews the technical aspects of the Twitter service, how it handles such a tremendous amount of tweets and other data, and looks at what we can learn from the findings. Twitter As we all know, Twitter, which launched its service in 2006, is expanding at an amazing pace. Simply put, the scale of service is amazing, but what is even more amazing is its growth rate. Understanding Twitter For those of us who are satisfied with sitting in the passenger seat, here is a brief outline of the services provided by Twitter. Twitter is a micro blogging service. Here are two core services of Twitter: One is to allow you to read (follow) the tweets of others in whom you are interested. Replied tweets can only be seen by users who follow both you and the owner of the original tweet. Real-Time Data in Twitter Tweets Timelines
How to Fix Location-Based People Discovery Philip Cortes is co-founder of people discovery startup Meeteor. Follow him on Twitter @philipcortes. No clear winner came out of South by Southwest’s battle of people discovery apps. Highlight seems to have received the best press, and according to Robert Scoble, about 5% of SXSW used the service. Why did these apps fail? 1) Lack of Single-Player Mode. 2) Not Capturing Intent. The social overlap between users can act as the lubricant that facilitates meeting, but it alone won’t compel two strangers to meet. 3) Transparent Privacy Settings. 4) Pick a Niche. 5) Mimic Offline Behavior. All five of these solutions don’t have to be solved perfectly in order for one app or web service to win the race.
HP “All in on Big Data.” More Acquisitions Ahead? HP has watched Big Data develop over several years and believes that it will cause major disruption in the storage and systems market, says Manoj Goyal, Senior Director of Data Management Solutions in HP’s Enterprise Group. As a result, “HP is all in on Big Data,” he said in an interview in The SiliconAngle Cube at HP Discover 2012 (full video below). It is working to develop a complete ecosystem around Hadoop that includes hardware, middleware, software, and services to “make Big Data more accessible to customers.” HP, he said, is solving the “Big Data consumption problem. Meanwhile, Goyal’s group is working with Autonomy and Vertica internally to create a software layer to support Big Data analysis. “Clearly Vertica is the best place to take the Big Data once it is structured,” he said. Meanwhile, HP Labs “started well ahead of any other business units, as you would expect, analyzing the needs of Big Data.” HP also realized early that Big Data goes hand-in-hand with cloud.
Understanding Big Data « opencollaborarchy The more we know the less we understand. Nowhere is this more true than on the Social Network, where volume, velocity, volatility and variability are increasing on a daily basis. Those 4 V’s are part of a definition of big data, which includes both structured and unstructured data. We may have a reasonable chance of obtaining valuable information from the structured data population. That depends, of course, on the extremity of any single one or combination of the 4 Vs, yet author, time stamp, location or any other tag that accompanies a communication is easily identifiable. Howerver unstructured data poses a challenge several orders of magnitude greater. In general there are no data models, no data definitions, no rules and no discipline of housekeeping for unstructured data in Social Media. Knowing how to perform the three C’s is therefor one of the keys to success. 1. Peter Drucker dies at 95 (Photo credit: IsaacMao) 2. 3. 4. 5. Like this: Like Loading...
Google's Knowledge Graph Has An Error 20% Of The Time Google’s knowledge graph which launched a little over a month ago is reportedly often wrong. Conductor ran a study showing that for trending terms, the knowledge Google is providing via their knowledge graph is wrong about 20% of the time. By trending, Conductor looked at the top 50 ‘people’ in Google Trends and Google Insights and 1 out of 5 of them had outdated or wrong information. For those in the Top 50 on Forbes’ Celebrity 100 list, Google is more often right, with only a 4% chance of the information being outdated. Brian Ussery this morning wrote how even Matt Cutts, Google’s head of search spam, entry has wrong information. Brian looked at how other Knowledge Graph entries are also wrong and then Conductor published their study showing the accuracy rate of the data in these knowledge graphs. As you know, the data comes from sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and others and thus the answers are only as good as the data being sourced for this information.