Last weekend, thousands of dressed up, euro-pop crazy people descended on Malmo, Sweden, to soak up the atmosphere and see this year’s Eurovision song contest.

Here at Brandwatch, we saw this as a fantastic opportunity to flex our data muscles and get analysing. We collected all tweets about the contest on the night of the final and have displayed that data in an interesting, visual way that also tells us a bit more about the Eurovision buzz.

As the data streamed in, we used Brandwatch’s Rules feature to categorise tweets according to the topic of conversation related to elements of the performance: song, voice, sex factor, outfit, appearance, dance routine, performance, political and stagecraft.

We also categorised them according to emotion, to further understand how people felt about each country’s entry.

On the night, during the show we collected nearly 1.8 million tweets – that’s a whole lot of Eurovision love (and some hate!) We’ve put together a dataviz that shows all the data by country and there are some interesting insights into how their performances were received.

Take a look at the viz here and have a play with the data – there’s some interesting insights to be found. For example, Belgium’s interesting ‘many arms’ dance routine provoked a lot of chat, whilst Spain’s use of lots of fog, lanterns and wind clearly made an impact on the audience.

There’s plenty more to see – take a look – but we’ve also pulled all of the data from the night together to provide some further insights.

Topics

When we look at all the data together and compare countries, we can see that Romania’s slightly odd Dracula-esque performance got the most buzz, followed by Ireland. Surprisingly, winners Denmark didn’t experience a significantly higher amount of buzz than other countries. We can see,however, that during the voting portion of the night, the discussion of political topics increases – no doubt the yearly complaints that voting has little to do with the actual songs.

Emotion

When we look at the data divided by emotion, we can see that there was quite a lot of love and joy throughout the night, which is nice; Eurovision always provides lots of fun.

As one Brandwatch fan, who attended the final, said: “The atmosphere both in and around the arena was electric, with thousands of fans milling around in all manner of outfits. Everyone was talking and taking photographs with fans from other countries and the overwhelming feeling was one of friendliness and goodwill.”

However, hate and anger increases during the end of the show – the voting section – which is no doubt viewers disagreeing with the voting choices of other countries.

Romania and Greece experienced the most emotional chatter, with Romania provoking quite a lot of fear and hatred, and Greece provoking more love, joy and excitement.

What amazed us this year was the sheer number of tweets about the Eurovision. At Brandwatch, we always strive to do something innovative and our matra is ‘Be bold, be brilliant’. This was the first time we’d tried to do a live dataviz, and we learnt a lot in the process.

We had tested our viz with last year’s data, and although we expected a rise in the volume of data, 1.7 million was more than we had anticipated. This led to the technical difficulties we experienced on the night, which meant that we couldn’t let users play with the dataviz live during the contest as we had hoped. We apologise to any fans who were disappointed, but hope that you enjoy playing with the viz now and looking back at the data.

The post What Social Media Revealed About the Eurovision Song Contest appeared first on Brandwatch.

Microsoft dominated the internet yesterday, with its much-anticipated launch of the successor to the Xbox 360. With a torrent of fanfare in the build-up to the 6pm BST announcement, we decided to keep an eye on the official #XboxReveal hashtag for the hour of the event.

We also thought it would be a good chance to show the kind of instant information you can gather from Brandwatch straight out the box, though the real level of insight that can be gleaned boggles the mind so greatly that it would be careless to even write it here, for fear of too many minds getting blown. We save that for our resources page.

The reveal

A staggering 248,789 tweets including the hashtag were posted on Twitter between 6-7pm BST last night, from all over the world. Americans led the way, with 51% of all mentions originating from the States, with the UK responsible for a further 20%.

But what was the response? Well, the professional writers were quick to analyse the impact of the reveal, with most siding that the announcement was on the underwhelming side.

The public, however, were more split in their opinion. Of all emotive conversation – the chatter with strong sentiment one way or another – it was almost even, with just over half adding positive comments on the reveal.

Looking more closely at some of the negative mentions, it appears as though issues with Kinect are at the forefront of the criticism.

A common topic among all of the mentions was actually the competition, with thousands of tweets commenting on Sony and its rival console. Most were negative towards Microsoft, with tweeters declaring their decision to side with the PlayStation 4, though many others said the reverse.

Other major topics of discussion were Halo and Call of Duty, both central titles in the press event, though neither drew particularly strong negative or positive discussion.

One method of communicating beyond words is through emoticons. A look at the top emoticons used with #XboxReveal confirms that the slight majority of people felt positive about the announcement, though the sadface also ranks highly.

1. :)
2. :D
3. :(
4. ;)
5. :P
6. :/
7. :-)
8. :O
9. :o
10. :p

It may be too early to draw any conclusions as to how successful Microsoft will be in shaping the perception of its new console, which will reach consumers by the end of the year, though the early signs are that the reception could not be more split – among the public at least.

More information and news from the tech giants may help change people’s minds, but for now Microsoft have lots to do and it’s all to play for. If you’d like to see how this kind of analysis can be done for yourself, get in touch and we’ll show you how you can drill much, much deeper into the data to find meaningful insights.

The post Xbox One Reveal Meets Mixed Reaction on Twitter appeared first on Brandwatch.

As social media has become an essential part of the marketing mix, in-depth analysis of ‘owned’ media channels is something we’ve seen an increasing need for.

Many of our clients told us that they wanted to track their own social channels, and that they were fed up of having to use multiple tools or of having to go into each platform to use the (often not very good) in-platform analytics.

Plus, they couldn’t get the kind of flexibility or power of features they so desired in order to really dig deep into their data.

That’s why we wanted to extend our offering into owned media analysis and why today we are excited to be launching Channels, a new Brandwatch feature that allows in-depth analysis of your – and your competitors’ – owned media channels.

We’re starting off with Facebook, available from Monday, with Twitter in Beta and YouTube on the way later in the year. More channels are planned for the future.

Here’s a short video about some of the difficulties our clients were having with owned media analysis, and why we decided to build Channels:

What does it do?

Facebook Channels goes beyond just telling you the number of ‘Likes’ on your page – it gives you much deeper insight and flexibility with your analysis.

Using the use cases of community, campaign and brand management (and Coca-Cola for the brand) as an example, here’s a sneak peek into some of the great tools Channels gives you.

Community, Campaign and Brand Management

So how can Channels be used to understand your owned communities?

Firstly, Facebook Channels gives you a great overview of top line metrics, over time, so you can see how your community is growing, and compare this to your competitors’.

That includes metrics such as posts, Page Likes, new Likes and ‘People talking about this’ (a Facebook metric about how many people have created ‘stories’ from your post), which can all be plotted over time and compared side-by-side.

You can plot this by month, week, day or even hour if you wish. Metrics such as likes and comment numbers update in near real-time.

For campaign and brand managers, the ability to track and compare metrics and growth over time means multiple campaigns – by the brand and by competitors – can be monitored, and the impact these have on the growth of the community understood.

Channels also lets you know who your most engaged and active fans on your page are, letting you identify relationships to nurture and drive advocacy.

It highlights the most impactful posts from both you and your audience, so you can see what drives conversation and which posts and comments need responding to first.

That also means you can understand which types of posts – links, photos, video, statuses etc – have the most impact, allowing you to optimise your content output and apply these learnings to future campaigns.

Channels also includes Brandwatch’s topic and sentiment analysis capabilities, meaning you can further understand the conversation within your community, in order to better serve the community’s needs and understand the best ways of engaging with the

Using our tagging and categorisation features, you can easily compare mentions of different campaigns and analyse the topics and sentiment of conversation surrounding them.

There’s loads more flexibility in terms of charting and further analysis of the data. For example, you could use our post type data in order to see which types of posts you create most, and which get the most engagement. You could then compare that to competitors to see what’s working for them.

You can also use Brandwatch’s rules, workflow and categorisation features to better manage the community and make sure you’re always on top of everything – the possibilities are endless!

What’s more, having this in-depth owned media analysis alongside the earned media analysis Brandwatch already provides means that you can now track both in one platform and get a greater understanding of how a campaign or social strategy impacts earned mentions, and therefore better understand the ROI of your social activities.

There are of course many other things you can do with Channels, but we’ll let you have a play and discover those yourself (we’d be here all day otherwise!)

Find out more

Channels is available to all Brandwatch users from next week. If you’d like more info or have any questions, get in touch.

Not a Brandwatch client but wish you were? Request a demo.

We’re also holding a webinar to take a look at the importance of owned media tracking and how Channels can help. Register here:

EMEA – Thurs 30th May 2-3pm BST: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/681988054

USA – Tues June 4th, 1-2pm EDT: https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/548694478

The post Introducing Channels: Bringing the Power of Brandwatch to Owned Media Analysis appeared first on Brandwatch.

One of the main practical applications of using Brandwatch is for public relations companies. It’s no surprise then that Waggener Edstrom has found using the social media analytics tool an essential part of its success, of which they’ve had plenty.

Winner of over 100 awards in 2012, the Washington-headquartered PR agency had been using Brandwatch for over a year when it started planning some research around the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.

Waggener Edstrom planned to use the event as a showcase of their ability to measure social buzz and provide meaningful insight on the so-called ‘Social Olympics’ and the countless brands investing in association with them.

In order to track the conversation around the Olympics, they needed access to multilingual Twitter coverage, the ability to listen to mentions from Chinese micro-blogging site Weibo and also the desire to retrieve historical mentions for the past few months.

You can read the entire case study on how Waggener Edstrom used Brandwatch for their social media analytics here.

To achieve their specific goals, Waggener Edstrom capitalised upon several particular strengths of Brandwatch.

Visualising relevant data

Waggener Edstrom developed an infographic that enabled brands communicating during the Olympics to quickly recognize their:

• Overall conversation volumes on Twitter and Weibo
• Breakdown of share of voice among competing brands
• Regional differences in tone of conversations
• Reasons behind spikes in brand-specific “buzz”
• Impact of timing on brand discussions (pre-games, mid-games, and post-games)

Location detection and page type filtration

The team used the results as a demonstration of how social comments vary by region and across different social platforms. The agency uses insights like these to help clients tailor messages and choose appropriate channels for their customer audiences.

Language Support

Brandwatch’s historical social media data tracking and coverage in 25 languages was exactly what Waggener Edstrom needed. Being a global company, while some analysis was be done on Twitter in the London office, the firm’s Shanghai and Singapore office were spending time reviewing Weibo activity.

Data manipulation tools

As results poured in for each brand, the Brandwatch platform meant that Waggener Edstrom could automatically categorise, analyse, divide and manage the data with ease. The agency team could then easily export the data and send it to their design team for maximum visual impact.

To find out the results of Waggener Edstrom’s endeavors in full, and read more about how they used Brandwatch, you can download the full case study here.

The post How Social Media Analytics Boosted PR Agency Waggener Edstrom appeared first on Brandwatch.

It’s back again; ready your flags and prepare your party food. It’s Eurovision time.

This year the competition is being held in Malmo, with Sweden having won last year with their fantastic song Euphoria. Rumour has it Loreen will be making another appearance at the final.

The first of the semi-finals has already taken place, complete with various women in white dresses and some dubstep spacemen (who unfortunately didn’t make it to the final).

We’re getting ready for the final this Saturday, and have something exciting in store for you!

As we love a bit of cheese – as do our friends in our German offices – we thought why not get into the Eurovision spirit and do something fun around the evening?

And thus was born our Eurovision dataviz. It’s an online viz that tracks Twitter buzz during the Eurovision final, in real-time.

As the data flows in, it is automatically categorised by country, and chat about each country during their performance is put into one of nine categories: outfit, political, sex factor, appearance, dance routine, stagecraft, performance, voice and song. Pretty neat huh?

You can see the dataviz here: eurovision.brandwatch.com

We’re launching at 8pm on Saturday 18th May, in line with the start of the final, but here’s a sneak peek of what it’s going to look like:

You’ll be able to zoom into each country and see the graph fill up during their performance with online chatter, in real-time.

We’ll also be providing a live commentary in the form of annotations on the data streams, so that you can see what spikes in conversation are related to, as well as pulling in the wittiest tweets from the general public!

The dataviz is browser-based and also supports the use of iPads, so you can keep track whilst watching the Eurovision show live on TV. It’s a perfect accompaniment for when you’re watching the show – you’ll be able to see what is driving conversation, which countries are generating the most buzz, and the emotions surrounding the performances.

You can find the dataviz at eurovision.brandwatch.com both during and after the live final on Saturday May 18^th.

There will be both an English and German version of the dataviz, pulling in the relevant language tweets – you can switch between them if you’re curious about how German buzz compares to the UK.

Here at Brandwatch HQ, and in typically British style, we’re not feeling too confident with the UK’s entry, ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart‘ legend Bonnie Tyler singing her new song ‘Believe in me‘.

Even she seems to have somewhat resigned herself to the fact that the UK won’t win, saying in an interview: “I can take it on the chin if I don’t get a good score but I hope I can win, although I doubt it.”

Our colleagues in the German office are keeping their fingers crossed that Cascada will prove a winning entry for them.

So, pick a side – UK or Germany (not that Great Britain will ever ever win – we all know it’s a political thing really) – sit down with some nibbles and enjoy our Eurovision tracker … and the show.

The post Track the Social Sound of Eurovision with our Real-Time Dataviz appeared first on Brandwatch.

There are lots of influential people in the world of social and it’s always good to learn from others. We’ve interviewed three people we see making waves in social media, so that they can share their wisdom with you.

We’ve already posted an interview with Head of Social Strategy at Adobe EMEA Jeremy Waite.

This week, we’ve been talking to Ian Cleary, founder of RazorSocial.com and writer for Social Media Examiner.

Ian is a social media tools and social media technology specialist, and is a recognised social media speaker. His blog was recently named as one of the top 10 social media blogs in the annual Social Media Examiner blog awards.

He took some time out to share his inspirations and thoughts for us here.

How/why did you first get into social media as a career?

I was working in several software startup companies and in my last one we were acquired by a very large company. I love working in a fast-paced startup environment, so a large corporate didn’t work for me!

I left and started consultancy, and was asked to give a presentation on social media. I became very interested in social media and spent morning, noon and night reading up about it; I was hooked.

I then developed a good business out of consultancy, training and social media app development.

What inspires you to write about social media tools?

I have 20 years experience in technology and 5 years in social media. I have a strong passion for both and my strength and interest is more on the technology side of social media rather than the strategic side.

I love learning about and writing about social media tools and social media technology.

What do you love about social media?

I learn every day! I get bored quite easily and with social media it’s very difficult to get bored, because it rapidly changes.

What do you dislike about it?

Most businesses fail to realize the potential of social media and just use it as another sales channel.

What’s your favourite social platform and why?

I love Twitter because I meet and engage with so many great people.

What’s your favourite social media tool?

Hootsuite is my favourite tool. It has some great functionality and I use it regularly every day.

Who are the people in social who inspire you most?

Mike Stelzner and Mark Schaefer are two of the most inspirational people for me.

I met Mike at Blogworld in June last year and I had already read his excellent book. I think it’s amazing what he has achieved with Social Media Examiner in such a short time.

I also really admire Mark Schaefer. I got hooked on his fantastic content but I also got to know him personally and I think he is an amazing guy. If I owned a large corporate and needed a social media strategy, he is the guy I would talk to.

There are so many others in the social media world that also inspire me.

Marcus Sheridan is an amazing guy that is so passionate about what he does. He would turn any workforce into a super enthusiastic one.

I also admire Joe Pulizzi, who took a concept of content marketing and created a fantastic business out of it. I was at his conference in Ohio last year and loved it.

Which brands do you think do social particularly well?

As an organisation selling to consumers I think Coca-Cola are doing an amazing job keeping up with the innovations of social media.

From a B2B perspective, I really admire what Hubspot do on a daily basis. Their model for lead generation through social channels will be copied by millions of organizations in years to come.

What 3 changes do you think we’ll see in the world of social media tools in the next year?

1. I think there will be some consolidation of tools, as there are too many tools with similar features. Some of the tool providers will not be able to raise any more money so they will have to consolidate or close up.

2. There will be more acquisitions. Large corporates find it difficult to be innovative and move fast. The best way of them getting into the social media tools market is acquiring companies.

3. I think someone is going to come up with a framework for tools that many vendors will adopt. This software framework will allow social media tool providers to integrate with it so that many tools can interoperate together using this framework. This will save customers a lot of headaches and time!

Want to feature on Brandwatch? We’re always looking for people who know their stuff to contribute articles and interviews - get in touch!

The post Three Wise Men: An Interview with SM Technology Specialist Ian Cleary appeared first on Brandwatch.

You might have noticed that we’re pretty focused on employee satisfaction here at Brandwatch. We have super cool offices and a great team, and the culture is one of transparency, collaboration and respect.

One of our initiatives is Funky Friday: our dev team are allowed to spend Friday afternoons working on their own projects or ideas – anything that they have a burning desire to develop, but which doesn’t fall under their usual projects.

At the end of the day, everyone presents their ideas and if any of them are good enough – which they often are – they get put into the roadmap and become part of the product.

That means every developer gets the opportunity to shape the direction of the app. Every now and again, we have full day Funky Fridays, complete with pizza and a ‘theme’ to work from (say, ‘authors’).

Recently, some of the product team were considering a ‘no code’ Funky Friday, and this led them to think ‘if there’s no code, then why can’t everyone take part?’

Product Manager Glenn White said: “Brandwatch is full of very smart people and we wanted to have a day where everyone could devote their time to new big ideas.”

And thus was born SMAFF – Super Mega Awesome Funky Friday – an afternoon where every employee (from the CEO to the commercial teams to the developers) got to put their brains together and come up with their ideas to make Brandwatch better, which took place last Friday.

Everyone was put into teams of 4 or 5, given an area of the office (complete with nibbles, plasticine, pens, post its and flipcharts) and given about 2 hours to come up with one idea.

The theme? ‘If you knew you couldn’t fail, what would you do to make Brandwatch better?) The emphasis was on moonshots.

At the end of the day, the teams all put together an A1 page explaining their idea and then everyone voted, in secret, for their favourite. The winners were revealed whilst everyone enjoyed a few beers.

Joel Windels, our Lead Community Manager, said: “It was interesting to start thinking about things that shape the entire company and go beyond what constitutes our normal roles. Working with colleagues that you don’t normally cross paths with to think of things no-one has even considered before was a refreshing and unusual experiment.”

There were some fantastic ideas at the end of the day – for now, they’re super secret, as some are now being considered for development in the future. ”It was a huge success and we have plenty of moonshots that we can build towards,” says White.

As well as some great ideas, the day was a fantastic opportunity for everyone to work together, and to get involved with the development side of the company.

Account Director Andy Keetch says: “SMAFF lived up to its name, and it is an excellent way to show that ideas can and should come from all parts of the business. I loved that everyone got to contribute, throw ideas about, and get working towards making more cool stuff happen”.

We’d recommend every company to do similar. Big ideas can come from anyone, no matter what their title!

The post Why Our Employees Spent An Afternoon With Plasticine and Flipcharts appeared first on Brandwatch.

As we develop our social media analytics platform, we spend lots of our time thinking about the practical uses that our clients may use it for. Though we consider many potential user types, sometimes innovative businesses themselves uncover new and powerful ways to get more out of Brandwatch.

One such industry we’re seeing rapid uptake of novel social media intelligence practices in is the broadcasting sector. Indeed, several media companies have recently invested in a partnership with Brandwatch, including the TV giant Sky News, or more specifically the Sky News Arabia venture.

Sky join a legion of other companies making use of Brandwatch’s leading capabilities in Arabic and the Middle East, both in terms of language options and the breadth, relevancy and granularity of its data coverage.

Read why and how Sky News Arabia use Brandwatch to gain the upper hand in their business in the full case study PDF.

The media company has not long joined the likes of BBC Arabic and Al Jazeera in covering news throughout the MENA region, and has added Brandwatch to its suite of tools in a bid to become the leading broadcaster in the region, by achieving:

• Fast coverage that is first to the air waves
• Credible, unbiased journalism that is well-conceived and innovative
• Content that is highly accessible and responsive to viewer needs

Below are some of the techniques Sky News Arabia is employing to harness the full power of social media monitoring.

1/ Quick-Hit competitive intelligence

Sky News Arabia keeps tabs on not only its own performance online, but also that of its competitors. This includes owned social channels, perception of news stories and countless other criteria, which can all be monitored, benchmarked and compared within one web dashboard.

2/ Objective measures of perceived news quality

The flexibility of Brandwatch’s query-based searches allows Sky News Arabia to customise a system in which the quality of their output can be measured. This means that the institution can assess how impartial their content is perceived to be – an underlying tenet at the heart of the broadcaster – as well as judge the individual performance of each of its reporters in this respect

3/ More effective and continuous viewer engagement

Rather than simply tally follower numbers, likes and volumes, Brandwatch affords a level of detail that allows Sky News Arabia to carve out meaningful insights from their activities online. Managers now understand which tweets generate the highest buzz, which topics get re-tweeted most frequently, and who does the re-tweeting; granting them a unparalleled ability to efficiently craft their social media plan.

4/ Quality analysis of Sky News staff reporting

Adopting practices such as live-tweeting from breaking events helps boost Sky’s reputation as a breaking news source. Journalists’ ability to do this, as well as their performance in reporting and across social media, can be measured by the management team using Brandwatch for use in periodic reviews and general assessments.

5/ Streamlining operations

Sky firmly believe that in their industry, time is of the essence. Sky News Arabia takes full advantage of Brandwatch to remain swift and to get quality coverage out fast. Having data aggregated in one place makes it much easier to analyze the information and to focus on what’s important rather than spending time manually collecting information.

The full case study can be viewed here, in which you can read more about the ways it is using Brandwatch to enhance their social intelligence operations.

The post How Sky News Arabia are Pioneering Social Media in Broadcasting appeared first on Brandwatch.

There’s a definite shift going on in social media at the moment.

It comes in the form of a major move from seeing social media as something ‘ad hoc’ and tactical to seeing it as something that needs a framework, a strategy and an overall plan in order to actually deliver on its promises.

Some might have had a “well, obviously” moment, when Twitter’s UK sales director this week said that campaigns on the platform must “have an objective” – but he tapped into a sentiment that brands are now understanding too. It’s no longer OK to ‘wing it’.

One element of this is the desire by businesses to make sure that their social media works not just locally, but in every market in which they have a presence.

It’s often said that the world is now smaller than ever. But in terms of social media – which is, at the end of the day, about how people behave – we’re as different from our neighbours around the globe as we’ve always been.

People use platforms differently in different markets. And of course, they sometimes use different platforms altogether.

At the same time, a brand might have a global positioning – or may be seen very differently in different markets. Legislation may differ for some brands in other territories.

It is, in short, a delicate thing to get right.

So how can you make sure that your social media is aligned around the world as well as it can be?

Here are three ways in which you can begin to make sure your social media is working as well in Britain as in Botswana:

Global strategy, local implementation. 

Having a central framework is essential to understanding how to plan for social media in different markets.

Not only do you need to allocate resources effectively, but you need to be
able to provide content that’s right for different markets, at appropriate times.

Having some sort of overview is essential to having any element of control or understanding – and to make sure everything is run as efficiently as possible.

Communication is a two way street.

It’s not enough to tag ‘local’ on at the end. Discussion with your local markets needs to be fed in from the start, and continually. This is where you’ll get your insight and knowledge.

Local teams are not just your boots on the ground, but they’re your eyes on and ears too. Set up regular conference calls or try to make sure teams or representatives meet face to face as often as they can.

Where are decisions made?

Empower your local team to make decisions (and let them know that you’ll support them). But also make it clear when things need to be escalated to global management.

A clear line of responsibility will make everyone more confident and empower them to do their job better.

This is a guest post by social media agency Yomego.

The post How Can You Align Social Media Marketing on a Global Basis? appeared first on Brandwatch.

I went to hear Nate Silver speak last Tuesday as part of his UK speaking tour. You may have heard of him: an American statistician, pollster and data nerd (I’m not mocking him: there was a bloke in the audience with that written on a T-shirt. I sort of coveted it.)

He correctly predicted the outcome of the most recent US election in all 50 states.

Smart, yet humble, one of Silver’s key premises is that whilst so-called Big Data yields a rich source of predictive insight, it’s only as insightful as those analysing it. In other words, analysis counts and, without it, the use to which we put data is unacceptably fallible.

In his own words (from his recent book The Signal and the Noise, page 9):

“Data-driven predictions can succeed – and they can fail. It is when we deny our role in the process that the odds of failure rise. Before we demand more of our data, we need to demand more of ourselves.”

Big Data is mentioned, it seems, at practically every conference I attend these days. And I attend quite a few.

It’s an exciting time in the data world, and the use to which we put data and how we handle the volume, variety and velocity of Big Data is a question that many claim to have addressed with their great services or methodologies.

But can it be done at all?

The challenges within data

Challenges inherent within data – big or otherwise – have been listed by more statistically savvy minds than mine, not least of which is Silver’s. To summarise and paraphrase some of those challenges:

• Data without analysis lacks context
• Data creates bigger haystacks; there’s more ‘noise’ but not necessarily a greater number of ‘signals’ (insight, in other words)
• Datasets are never complete; modelling using an incomplete dataset increases the risk that you’re missing the key insight that will prove the exception to the rule and discount your theory

And, perhaps most importantly:

• There are biases contained within data, from its compilation through to its interpretation

Social media data

It’s a moot point whether social media data is actually ‘Big’. But let’s assume for a moment that it shares enough of Big Data’s characteristics to be taken as such, particularly in aggregate with other data sources.

It becomes clear that, despite the challenges, this data also has value because:

• It yields interesting results around consumer intention, if not prediction about their future behaviour
• Sourcing it is fast as well as relatively cheap, compared to your average polling methodology
• And manipulating it (using tools like Brandwatch) to gain insight is a fairly straightforward process

All of this returns us to our original point: without analysis, data will not simply magically yield insight. This is felt particularly keenly when analysing social sources.

It’s all about context

Context is provided by additional information such as metadata and biographical information and the analyst. This context further enriches the results and helps to create a story out of them.

The social space is filled to the brim with examples of data where, without a consideration of the broader context, meaning can be misconstrued entirely.

A recent study combining Hurricane Sandy-related Twitter data and Foursquare data for the wider New York area demonstrated this.

During the peak of the storm, the majority of tweets were actually from Manhattan, reflecting Twitter usage patterns rather than storm damage or impact. Correlation does not equal causation.

The very ambiguity of human emotion makes it difficult to analyse in aggregate, but social data combined with analysis of that data gives us verbatim insight, alongside indicative qualitative findings, into the minds of consumers, customers, clients, the end user in other words.

Qualitative and quantitative

For those, like Nate Silver, who are interested in who’s going to win elections (though he did say last week that he’s a bit bored with talking about the recent US election), the combination of qualitative and quantitative insight tells a rich story that people love to hear about the battle for hearts and minds of the American population in a highly polarised voter context.

An example closer to home would be to look at the impact of Twitter activity on David Cameron’s account (he doesn’t write his own tweets, or does he?)

We did a piece recently looking at this, and found that there is an optimum level of engagement and diminishing returns when he (or one of his people) post more frequently.

Of course, it’s also important to factor in what is published. People switch off when they reach saturation point (not just in the social sphere, right?) and this depends as much on what is said as well as how frequently he (or anyone) speaks.

There is plenty of insight to be gained from analysing data, and I spend most of my day talking to clients about how to do this. But what I love about data – and this is an oft under-appreciated aspect of it – is that it’s actually about people.

Apart from the obvious exception of spam, behind every data point is a person who has something to say.

In the social space it is no longer an option not to listen, but just be aware of assumptions, extrapolations and, of course, your own bias when doing so.

The post Big Data: Only as Insightful as Those Analysing It appeared first on Brandwatch.