A guest post from Beyond‘s VP of Analytics, Bo Moody, who attended the hub on Tuesday:
The second day of Social Media Week San Francisco included a hub on Social Technology and Analytics hosted by IBM and Razorfish. The day kicked off with a Keynote from Rod Smith, VP of Emerging Technologies who gave everyone a fascinating overview of how IBM is crunching social media data to do predictive analysis. Some of the more interesting case studies were the analysis of social media data to predict movie sales and communicate the occurrence of a natural disaster.
Next, came a discussion about big data and mining social media with Marie Wallace, Social Analytics Strategist of IBM Collaborative Solutions; Joe Davy, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of EvoApp, and Victor Balta, Managing Editor, CurrentTV moderated by Ed Elze. A lively discussion ensued with all the panelists making interesting points, including a comment by Victor who said, being able to effectively mine social media, was potentially the ultimate focus group.
The Social Media Insights Shootout between Erin Korogodsky, Social Strategist, Lithium Technologies and Chase Munson Senior Research Analyst, Beyond and moderated by Mark Lewis Group Strategy Director, Venables, Bell and Partners was next. The shoot-out was based on a brief, which can be found here. After a rousing game of rock-paper-scissors to determine who presented first, the shootout began. Chase, who relied on automated tools and human coders, went though his detailed result ultimately determining that the client should sponsor Tim Tebow. Erin Korogodsky who utilized automated tools on the other hand felt Tebow was too controversial, and would not make a great sponsor. Ultimately, there was a consensus that while the data was extremely valuable, other factors needed to be taken into consideration.
After lunch, we were treated to a fascinating vision the future of persuasion from Jason Tester, Research Director, Human Future Interaction from The Institute for the Future. The report broke persuasion into seven forces: Digital Mirrors, Network on my Shoulder, Telepathic Technologies, No-click world, Epic Win, Amplified Imagination, Awe-gmented Reality. And while Jason was only able to touch on the first couple of forces, he gave us an intriguing view of how technology is already impacting our lives.
Next, were two panels which focused on the details of what and why of social media analytics. The first was all about using behavioral analytics to understand the impact of social media. This is an area where a real impact is starting to be felt. Ben Straley of Meteor Solutions, Marc Sanford of Razorfish, and Sree Nagarajan of Colligent all gave great examples, often using client data, of how they teased out certain behavioral data and are then imputing back into their systems or models to improve ROI.
The next panel, which took the form of a jeopardy game, focused on understanding value and importance of fans, likes and shares. Of course we all know all fans are not created equal, but it was fascinating to hear the panelists discuss how they think of fans, likes and shares.
Finally, Robyn Schwartz, Associate Director, Retail Analytics from IBM gave a wonderful talk (actually it was more of a discussion as the audience actively participated) where she discussed Watson and the future on using powerful computers to crunch the every expanding amounts of data.
All in all is was a really great day with lots of new insights and great speakers.
