Before you can analyze, you need data. In thinking of what you can do with social media data, I find it helpful to think about three buckets of social media data: content, activity, and people data. Let's talk about content. If you look at social media from one angle, that's what it is: lots of content. What do you do with that?

What is Content Data?
When we talk about listening and how people express their opinions, we're talking about working with content data. From the text of tweets, blog posts, and product reviews to pictures, videos, and audio recordings, content is everything that people are posting and sharing online. When people ask about sentiment, opinion, and complaints, they're asking about content.

Analyzing Content Data

Remember consumer-generated media? That was the ... Read the article

Before you can pull insights from your data, you need data, but I'm hearing more concerns about data quality in social media analysis lately. Before, people asked about the traditional tradeoff in text queries: finding relevant content while excluding off-topic content. Lately, I'm hearing more about social data that's intentionally tainted. If you're looking for meaning in social media data, you may have to deal with adversaries.

Yes, and you've been playing without an opponent, which is, as you may have guessed, against the rules.
— "Anton Ego," Ratatouille

Ask a company with three initials as a name how many three-letter... Read the article

Businesses need to make smarter decisions, quicker. The smart business of the future will correlate and compute a mix of demographics, psychographics, web analytics, social analytics and business intelligence to create predictive scenarios that can be delivered in real time at the point of need; this will enable those with access to make better informed decisions that more accurately impact performance in a positive way. This creates vital brand differentiation in the market place and sustains real competitive advantage. ... Read the article

This is a term that Dave Weinberger used in his KM World article, Letting data out of its box, that my friend, Geoff Bock, pointed out to me.  Dave is talking about open data, which is data that has metadata that is open to link to other data. Then interesting things can happen, As Dave writes, “Once you let data out of its box—out of its cell—it immediately links up with everything it can, because that's how meaning works: One thing leads to another, and if it doesn't, it's non-sense.”

He adds that open data has value because of its links, “and links—the frisky little devils—just want to go forth and multiply.” Dave was writing these... Read the article