My monthly content marketing column today focuses on trend tracking in the social media wild.
It shouldn’t be hard to do this, right? Everywhere you look you see various trending reports, and there are many services which aim to index, organize and take the pulse of online content and interactions.
However my quest to get information in a certain way proved to be very frustrating, and in studying this I came to better understand what is needed to glean useful intelligence from that vast Petri dish we call the social, real-time Web. It is the ultimate big data challenge.
My inquiries gave me the chance to catch up with Jure Leskovec, a Stanford Universtiy researcher whom I spoke with for a series of posts on this blog, and today’s column.
Jure and his team have an impressive workbench and process, as I explained in my post: Study Indentifies Popularity Curves for Online News.
Over a number of projects they have taken a microscope to millions upon millions of archived tweets and blog posts to study cause and effect in the spread of information, and how online influence works.
But how to study trends on live data in real time or almost real time? It is another question altogether.
When I spoke with Jure for my column, he explained some of the obstacles, relevant areas of study and technology, and also took some time to explain his latest paper (which explored how information spreads when it originates within networks vs. topics introduced from outside sources, like mainstream media).
The challenges are not insignificant – they push technologies related to AI, semantic search, storage, processing, cloud and unstructured data analytics past the current limits.
You can read more about what I was trying to accomplish in my column; hopefully, vendors are paying close attention, as I provide a wish list of functionality that I believe most social media marketers would find to be very useful
The opportunities are clear: as more conversations and information migrate online, the prize will go to those who can get there first, in terms of gleaning useful info, and acting on it.
really great and informative post..