What happens in a world of radical transparency, with data widely available? As information becomes more readily accessible across sectors, it can threaten companies that have relied on proprietary data as a competitive asset. The real-estate industry, for example, trades on information asymmetries such as privileged access to transaction data and tightly held knowledge of the bid and ask behavior of buyers. Beyond real estate, cost and pricing data are becoming more accessible across a spectrum of industries. How can big data augment or even replace management? MORE >>

In reality there must be hundreds of firms out there doing social media analysis in some form or another but I tried to hit the most popular ones with the single-minded goal of finding a firm that could deliver the most strategic value from the 2+ years of social media data that’s out there. You can also download the data and operate on it as well in CSV format files. SENTIMENT BASED ANALYTICS. Their data includes the full twitter fire hose (first provider to get the fire hose). They have a research department that produces reports, which come in various flavors. MORE >>

However, prior to that we had a great chat with Steve King of Emergent Research , and I wanted to give you the much-delayed recap from that chat. And that is because far too many public relations practitioners still don’t understand the importance of research. After all, research is what “strategic communications&# are supposed to be based on, right? On the different types of research: primary, secondary, etc.: Steve said, “Primary research is the collection of data that does not already exist. Research is fun! Right. How much? MORE >>

Before you can analyze, you need data. In thinking of what you can do with social media data, I find it helpful to think about three buckets of social media data : content, activity, and people data. What is Content Data? When we talk about listening and how people express their opinions, we're talking about working with content data. When people ask about sentiment , opinion , and complaints , they're asking about content. Analyzing Content Data Remember consumer-generated media? Next: Working with Social Media Data: Activity. MORE >>

There is a value to social media data, both a quantitative significance and a qualitative importance.  Businesses, non-profits, government agencies, and others, leverage data to learn about consumers and clients in order to tailor and enhance experiences, both online and offline.  But when is data a crutch?  When do we value hard numbers too much, and lose sight of sentiment and emotive data? Sentiment analytics lets a business, researcher, marketing professional and the like, explain and quantify online behaviors.  MORE >>