2. Every minute:
• 48 hours of video are downloaded on Youtube
• 320 new accounts and 98,000 tweets appear
on Twitter
• 168,000,000 million emails are sent
• 20,000 new posts on Tumblr
• 6,600 photos appear on Flickr
• Over 20% of all websites are
CMS/wordpress/etc…
@cgtheoret
11. But…
• Facebook has lost 1.5 million users in Canada
and 6 million in the United States
• Yahoo study: 50% of the content that is read
and shared by humans is produced by only
20, 000 accounts
@cgtheoret
13. This flood of data isn’t only about the scale that
is nearly impossible to grasp in human terms.
Other internal dynamics come into play and
challenge interpretation . . .
@cgtheoret
16. This is so complicated, Stanford now offers a
course on this subject:
@cgtheoret
17. Who is the professor who gives these courses in statistics and
marketing ?
A physicist, of course…
Andreas Wiegend. Before accepting a position at Stanford, he was the
Chief Data Scientist at Amazon. He coined the term “Social Data
Revolution.”
@cgtheoret
18. Facebook (and Zynga) are sitting on the biggest, most
detailed sociological database ever created by humankind.
Facebook owns all this data and is not sharing it.
This database is used exclusively to sell advertising and . . . ?
@cgtheoret
19. Hereis the story of a Social Data « Robin Hood » …
Pete Warden
@cgtheoret
20. Pete Warden was an engineer at Apple when he decided to leave
and create a start up . . .
The start up didn’t work out. So in his spare time, he developed a
legal Facebook crawler using their own programming API.
In 2010, his crawler had been operating for 6 months and had
gathered information on 215 million users that he organized
according to city, state, etc., while maintaining users’
anonymity.
@cgtheoret
24. In 2010, LinkedIn hired a team of
17 people to do the same thing:
@cgtheoret
25. But can one “normal” person or company make
sense of this mass of data without having
access to teams of experts and an enormous
budget?
Hundreds of social media monitoring tools are
available:
195 tools here:
http://www.salesrescueteam.com/social-media-measurement-tools/
@cgtheoret
26. There is even a wiki with 224 tools:
http://wiki.kenburbary.com/
@cgtheoret
27. But even with the huge success of some
monitoring companies:
Radian6: $326 million / revenue ~ $20 Million
Sysomos: $34 million / revenue ~ $2 Million
Scoutlabs: $20 million / revenue ~ $1 Million
Postrank: bought by Google, BackType: bought
by Twitter, etc . . .
@cgtheoret
30. Monitoring / Analysis
• Monitoring tools present social network
data in Excel tables:
– As a list of “nodes” i.e., blog posts, tweets,
etc.
– In sequential order by date, one after the
other
– The emphasis is on real time
– This works for a few dozen or hundred . . .
but what about thousands of posts?
– Making sense of all those posts is very
expensive and labour intensive
@cgtheoret
31. Monitoring / Analysis
• The added value of social media
is not in raw data, but in
connections between people
And between ideas
• On a fundamental level, it is a
network
• …and a network = relations
• To understand a network, you
have to understand its relations
• To understand a single element in
the network, you have to
understand its context
@cgtheoret
32. With the “Social Graph” we can calculate “who
is talking to whom,” “who is connected with
whom,” and possibly where.
But we can go even further than that . . . .
@cgtheoret
33. With more information and calculations, we can
see what interests people and how their
interests are linked.
This is Facebook’s second challenge: ”The
interest graph.”
How are ideas and conversations connected in
the social web?
@cgtheoret
37. “The spirit of our times”
“Spirit” and “our times”: two concepts that are
hard to measure . . . all the more so when you
combine them . . .
@cgtheoret
42. So what exactly is an “interest graph”?
Here’s a concrete example.
Take Réjean . . .
6’2’’, 35 years old, married, lives in Val D’Or. . .
According to traditional market research . . .
@cgtheoret
49. Why do you need a physicist to understand the
social data revolution?
Because he is not just a physicist!! He
understands human behaviour . . .
@cgtheoret
