Getting sense from social media

Every Chief Marketing Officer worth their salt knows that the big marketing tool these days is social media. They are also aware that the big problem is finding ways of extracting sense and valuable information from such a resource. There is plenty of both to be found, but the trick is in finding it.

That is the goal that DataSift is now pitching at with VEDO. This is the latest processing engine for the company’s data platform, and features what the company calls Programmable Intelligence.This is seen by the company as a way of overcoming the increasingly felt lack of data scientists needed to help businesses make sense of exploiting big data systems.

Whereas conventional big data solutions typically require teams of data scientists to mine insight from unstructured data such as Facebook and Twitter posts and blog entries, DataSift VEDO features programmable machine learning and automated classification capabilities to extract insight at scale, enabling organisations to apply their resources toward innovation rather than building and maintaining specialised and costly infrastructure.

According to market researchers, IDC, by 2020 a third of the data in the digital universe (more than 13,000 exabytes) will have big data value, but only if it is tagged and analysed. While extracting insight from social data is now business-critical for many organisations, it is equally critical to view social data—and other big data types—in the context of other business signals.

For this reason, VEDO is also extensible to other types of unstructured content, such as data generated by enterprise social networks and from customer relationship management, business intelligence, market research, and other enterprise systems.

VEDO is a cloud-based solution that aggregates, processes and delivers unstructured social data, at scale, from multiple social networks and publishing sources. When added to DataSift platform it enables organisations to capture and contextualise data based on company-specific details or processes. DataSift VEDO then applies machine learning technology to enable users to train the platform to process and score content against custom criteria with extremely large data sets. The result is high-fidelity data refined to the needs of individual businesses and users.

It features three new capabilities. Programmable user rules allow business users and application developers to define custom rules, categorisations, weighting and scoring for unstructured data to extract meaning and context from large data sets. Machine learning capabilities Give users the ability to apply categorisations and custom rules to massive unstructured data sets, providing structure, automated processing and greater efficiency.

It also has a library of pre-built data science best practices and examples of classifiers for categorising and scoring unstructured social data to accelerate insight and application development.

“For all the promise of big data, most organisations are still challenged with manual processes and limited ability to deliver sustained business value,” commented Tim Barker, Chief Product Officer, DataSift. “DataSift VEDO solves this problem with advanced programmable intelligence capabilities, making it easy for users to define their own rules, categorize and customize data using data science best practice already built into our platform.”