Data Mining Wants to Friend You
As it zoomed toward the international space station orbiting about 200 nautical miles above us, the shuttle Discovery had to dodge clouds of space debris. Once there, the threat to human and technology treasure did not go away; apparently, pieces of debris as small as a grain of sand could cause serious damage. Perhaps I’m reaching a bit, but this seems like an apt analogy for organizations that are beginning to journey into the realm of social media to “discover” data patterns, relationships and other insights that have eluded them thus far in their analysis of data sources closer to home. All that unstructured stuff hurtling by on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other social media could be important. But, getting a closer look at it could also be dangerous; companies could run afoul of privacy rules and online social etiquette in ways that might damage their reputations.
At Predictive Analytics World, I noticed that when keynoters spoke about social media, the audience of data miners, software developers, business and statistical analysts put down their Blackberries and listened intently. You could feel it in the room: the next big data gold rush, or at least the next important phase of search engine optimization and e-marketing. I blogged at Intelligent Enterprise and Ventana Research about the conference and the growing awareness that many operational business intelligence (BI) implementations will need predictive analytics to make good on the “actionable information” promise of these applications. However, I am interested in how data mining and predictive analytics are being applied to social media and will be writing about this topic from time to time here.
Lauren McKay of CRM Magazine wrote about a Predictive Analytics World keynote by Usama Fayyad, CEO of Open Insights and former chief data officer for Yahoo!. Fayyad talked about the success of “behavioral targeting,” or analysis of search and Web browsing, and how it might be applied to social media interactions and increase the ability of online businesses such as Yahoo! to react and respond within a relevant time period. The implementation of predictive analytics tools and techniques could allow companies to improve their response rates not only by knowing more about their customers but also gaining greater mastery of time. Right now, it seems like a lot of online businesses are shooting in the dark about how long they should keep their marketing offers alive. If they could analyze (and begin to predict) the buzz about interests and products in social media, they could gain a better understanding of the life expectancy of marketing initiatives.
“Big as this industry is, we still haven’t figured out this business,” Fayyad said humbly in his keynote. The potential benefits and dangers of social media – or really, the whole field of behavioral information that will grow to include location data as people rely on mobile devices for search and social interaction – are enormous. We don’t want to get too breathless; after all, inertia rules how most large organizations market their products and services. But, tapping behavioral information could eventually rewrite many rules of marketing. A big question, along with cost-benefit analysis of course, is how much nosiness people will tolerate. However, that’s a topic for another blog.
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