We are all awash in dataThere’s more of it and its easier to access than ever beforeCompanies are stockpiling data and using it to their advantageSocial media in particular offers a new type of data – it provides attitudinal and behavioural information that wasn’t readily available just 5 years agoThe ability to connect this data to purchase behaviour is what has everybody so excited
There’s a lot of itAll of the information is completely unstructured and a lot of refining needs to be done to extract business valueWhether the oil sands remain viable depends on the cost per barrel. The oil sands only make sense if oil cost more than $100 barrellNot all of the required pipelines exist that connect the data to the market, making it challenging sometimes to calculate business value
There’s not only a lot of social media data, but there are many different ways to count it.
The data needs to be processed for it to become usefulFilteringCodingNLP
Data is a commodity product. Much like oil from the oil sands, there seems to be a magic number in terms of what’s needed in order for the oilsands to be viable.The cost of social media analysis has yet to find its floor, but it is safe today that people are largely unaware or unapreciative of how much labour actually goes into the manufacture of a quality, insightful measurement study – and moreover, there is a limit in terms of what the market is willing to pay to get the analysis they are looking for. Furthermore, they often find themselves paying for inferior alternatives – foresaking quality for something expedient.
The oilsands and social media are very much alike.Both were met with initial excitement as people drooled over the potential.A seemingly endless resources is hampered by the fact that the resource needs much refinement.The cost of extracting the resource may limit productionAnd there’s no established pipeline available to harness the resources true potentialThere’s a lot of handwringing that goes on in Canada when it comes to the oil sands. And while the excitement around social media is still strong, unless some of the issues I raised are satisfactorily resolved, social media may lose some it’s allure and ultimately be replaced by the next exciting thing to come around.