Tuesday, January 7, 2014

social media analytics

In this post we study the growing field of social media analytics. In order to address this at least somewhat satisfactorily, we will consider the outline below. All topics will be covered somewhat superficially for the cognoscenti, though in enough detail for the not too deeply initiated, so keep in mind this might either be rather basic, or quite sophisticated, depending on where you are coming from, if you decide to read it.

What is Social Media (for purpose of this post)?

By social media here we refer to all media that exhibit three characteristics:
1. low barrier to entry technology
2. widespread adoption
3. preferably a bi-directional communication channel

What do we think of social media given our definition: the blogosphere, yelp, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, recommender systems like Amazon and Netflix, etc., What are the technologies or media we speak of here? Mostly the Internet (WWW) and Mobile.

What do we mean by Analytics here?

We define Analytics as a means to analyze data to extract intelligent, actionable inferences that will enable us to generate "an edge". You can build an edge in any environment if you collect, analyze, and interpret the correct data correctly. The challenges here are many-fold - finding the right data to collect, then collecting the right data, then identifying the right set of analyses to run on that data, running the analyses correctly, generating intelligent, usable, actionable inferences therefrom, and finally applying the correct actions to build, develop, and maintain an edge in a business to profit from, and leave your competitors behind. Whew! if that sounds like a tall order, it is. Analytics is hard to get right, but also extremely important.

Social Media evolution
Social Media, by its very definition, is a networked platform. This means to grow a social platform, one needs more users over time to offer them services, and one needs services to attract and retain more users - so somewhat of a catch-22. Some of the most successful businesses are Network Platforms. 

  • Google revenues increase many-fold because it is a search platform that also offers advertising. The more it is used for search, the more eye-balls that will see the paid links that appear on the top of search results pages. The more there are ads, the more attractive searches may appear to be especially to people that are looking to buy particular products.
  • Amazon's sales muscle comes from hosting a fantastic platform where it can act as a digital shopfront at the same time gathering actual user reviews and feedback - this is useful not just to potential buyers, but also engenders a feeling of community. And this community attracts more sellers. Recently even Ikea started selling its wares over Amazon. It's a win-win.
  • Facebook brings users together. These users first came together to build a community in a simple platform with limited services. But as users grew, the medium became an interesting place to host/add new services. Now FB is an ecosystem, a platform on which new apps are built - and many other companies, like Zynga, Playdom etc use it as a substrate to grow their own businesses.
  • Twitter - the most prominent micro-blogging service today, helps people share meaningful short commentary, with the world, or a select group of followers, as they like. This works particularly well given how the new digital generations multi-task more, have shorter attention spans, and quicker context switches. We don't tend to think of the old SMS system in telephony as Social Media, but it is based on the same principle - SMS even had VASPs or Value Added Service Providers that were able to deliver jokes, horoscopes or other media of interest to subscribers... for a fee.
  • The number of social media platforms is increasing exponentially (WhatsApp, weChat, Telegram, ...), which is funny when one considers that the number of connected people (these have to have access to technology, sometimes leading edge technology, and large parts of the world do not have this yet), while growing, isn't growing as rapidly. Which means social media penetration among the population that has it is greater than 100% (this remark is made only somewhat tongue-in-cheek).

Uses and Applications of Social Media [Examples to be provided later...]

  • Education - social media debates, multi-player educational games, tutorials over Skype etc
  • Advertising - targeted location based advertising, opt-in ads, micro-targeted ads etc.,
  • Marketing - word-of-mouth marketing, trailers going viral, recommender systems etc
  • Sales - recommender systems, price discovery etc.,
  • Entertainment - finding suitable content socially, viewing together from remote locations etc
  • Services - e.g. weather forecasts, severe weather warnings, reverse 911 etc
  • News - news reporting, flash-mobs, etc 
  • Finance - investment analysis, social media sentiment analysis etc

Risks with Social Media Technologies
Typically, Internet Services need to have at least a simple security architecture in place. This means having components that account for functions such as authentication, authorization and accounting (collectively known as AAA) and non-repudiation, built into the system.

  • Authentication is a process that ensures that you are who you say you are when you request the service. A simple example of this is the use of user-name and password.
  • Authorization is the process of determining that you the authenticated user, has the right to perform the operations you request. For example, if you request that a particular computer log file be deleted, the computer system might not let you perform this action unless you were the systems administrator.
  • Accounting is the process of tracking the authorized actions you perform on the system, and then being able to charge you for these later, within the defined parameters of a billing model or system in place.
  • Non-repudiation is an add-on to authentication in that it ensures that once you say or do something, you cannot later disclaim having done so. In other words, your action is provably tied to your authenticated identity. An example of this is, if Bob digitally signs a document with his private key and sends it to Alice, if Alice holds him to the contents of that document at a later date, Bob cannot say he did not sign that document since only he is supposed to have knowledge of his private key.
A major issue with social media today is that not all of these components are available in all systems, even those with millions or hundreds of millions of users. Users casually and sometimes callously share their most personal and intimate details online, and these can be exploited by unscrupulous elements that abound on the Internet, either for personal gain or for defaming their character. This is a major risk that is quite important in the current social media application setting.

How to mine data from Social Networks
We cover this in a separate post.