Water Water Everywhere and Not a Drop to Drink -Making Use of Social Media Data (Part 1)

The ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle may seem like the quintessential Dead White Males, but in fact they’re very much alive. Twenty four centuries ago they laid the foundations of Western culture, and their ideas and insights still dictate essential features of our world right now, from what we eat to what we see on the internet.

Forget right brain/ left brain, neuroscientist debunked that theory years ago. And even forget men from mars and women from Venus. The real split that shapes our lives, our relationship and our culture is between our inner Plato and inner Aristotle.

Plato was a typical playboy from a wealthy, connected Athenian family until he met a man named Socrates, who taught him that the surest path to wisdom was rational contemplation, and that being a “lover of wisdom” or philosopher was the highest form of life.

Plato taught his students that all of us want to be part of something higher, a transcendent reality of which the world we see is only a small part, and which unites everything into a single harmonious whole. All of us, he said want to crawl out of the cave of darkness and ignorance, and walk in the light of truth.“There is no other road to happiness,” Plato concluded, “either for society or the individual” 

 

Plato’s most brilliant pupil, however arrived at a very different view. Growing up in a family of Greek physicians, Aristotle learned early on the value of observation and hands-on experience. We don’t live in a cave, was his reply to Plato; we live in the real world. “Facts are the starting point” of all knowledge, Aristotle wrote. So instead of accepting his teacher’s belief in pure contemplation, Aristotle said our path to knowledge comes through logical, methodical discovery of the world around us-and facts that make it up.

Aristotle asks: “How does it work?” Plato asks: “Why does it exist at all?”

Plato asks, “What do you want your world to be?” Aristotle asks, “How do you fit into the world that already exists?”

Plato asks, “What’s your dream? “ Aristotle replies, “Wake up and smell the coffee”.

Two different world-views: one great debate. Personally I think like Aristotle and I will pose similar questions in respect to Social Media. “Why does Social media exist?” and “How does your brand fit in the Social media world?” 

Well, this article is about Social media and how we can get meaningful data from Social Media (Twitter and Facebook) and use it to understand better our targets. (Customers and public opinion on brands for Marketers and Voters/Public opinion for politicians).

When I started mining data from Facebook using R I was doing it for fun. I was amazed by the ability to connect R with Facebook API and the potential held by the data I could retrieve. As a novice in Social media analysis I created some simple apps using Shiny (A package in R to build web based apps) which were fun to play with. 

I will share with you one app, I call it "The Facebook App" . It connects R with Facebook , R sends a request to Facebook API to get the list of pages the user has liked (The APP user). The Facebook API responds by allowing R to get the requested data in form of a Data frame. R writes the data frame into a .csv (comma separated format) file which you can download and view the list of pages you have liked.  You can follow this link to try the app https://gabrielmutua.shinyapps.io/facebook-App/ 

Later on I worked on project were I mined text Data on Twitter and performed Sentiment Analysis on it. It was interesting project and I learned a lot. I will share more on my past projects another day. I want to focus(on next series of blogs) on importance of social media data in understanding the target group/market.

In today’s world of social media and the wide variety of social media channels available, there is a huge amount of data available. The challenge comes in accessing that data and transforming it into something that is usable and actionable.

There are three major approaches to looking at social media: channel reporting tools, overview score- carding systems and predictive analytic techniques (primarily text mining). Each has its useful aspects, but each also has limitations.

  

In the next post I will discuss a fourth approach using a predictive analytic platform that includes not only text mining, but network analysis as well as other predictive techniques such as clustering to overcome not only the limitations of the previous techniques, but generate new fact based insight as well. I will use data mined from Twitter so be ready to learn something new.