1. Mining Social Data
Scott Arenson
VP, Dialogue
GolinHarris
sarenson@golinharris.com
213-438-8842

2. “Data is the New Oil”
- Michael Palmer, 2006
Summerland, California (Santa Barbara County), before 1906

3. What is information?
“Information” can be defined as flows of data created "
by and delivered to people.
• In 2008 Americans consumed
1.3 trillion hours of information
averaging 12 hours per day"
• Consumption totaled 3.6
zettabytes* of information"
How Much Information 2009" • An average person consumers
Report on American Consumers
more that 100,000 words and
34 gigabytes of information per
Global Information Industry Center
day
*1 zettabyte = one million gigabytes

4. “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.”

5. 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

6. 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

7. Defining social data

8. Essential future skills
• Skill #1: Statistics
“The sexy job in the
next ten years will be (Studying)
statisticians… The
ability to take data—to • Skill #2: Data
be able to understand
it, to process it, to Munging (Suffering)
extract value from it,
to visualize it, to • Skill #3:
communicate it—that’s
going to be a hugely
Visualization
important skill.”
- Hal Varian, Google
(Storytelling)
Chief Economist

9. Where do I start?
• Define goals and
objectives
• Select measures and
metrics
• Target data sources
• Leverage social
analytics methods
• Deliver the insights
Give me a place to stand on, and I will
move the Earth. - Archimedes
and storytelling

10. 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

11. Select measures and metrics
• Volume
• Topics
• Type
• Reach
• Sentiment
• Opinion
• Influence

12. Target data sources
• Google
– Blog search
– Trends
– News
– Maps
• Twitter search
• Technorati
• YouTube
• Wikipedia
• Flickr
• Foursquare
• LinkedData.org
• Data.gov

13. Leverage social analytics
methods and tools

14. Social media monitoring tools

15. Social Network Analysis

16. MentionMap

17. NodeXL

18. Deliver the insights
• Dashboards
• Reports and
memos
• Spreadsheets
• Data widgets&
gadgets
• Rich Infographics

19. Dashboards, memos &
spreadsheets

20. Data widgets & gadgets

21. Infographic core components
• Visual
– Color coding
– Graphics
– Reference icons
• Content
– Time Frames
– Statistics
– References
• Knowledge
– Facts
– Deductions