Social Studies Group

Creative Social Media Intelligence

  • Who We Are
    • About SSG
    • Managing Partner
    • SSG Culture
  • Services
    • Social Media Intelligence & Monitoring
    • Social Media Consulting & Strategy
    • Traditional Research
  • Contact Us
  • Field Notes
  • Subscribe
You are here: Home / Social Listening / It’s all about that base, ’bout that base.

It’s all about that base, ’bout that base.

October 28, 2014 By Wendy Scherer Leave a Comment

words
If you’ve ever heard me speak about social media research (or any research, for that matter), you’ve heard me drone on about the importance of having clean data to analyze.

Why, you ask?

Because you cannot get clean, smart insights from dirty data. You need a good base of data to start. Otherwise, you’ll be analyzing spambot messages and how would that help you make decisions for marketing or strategy? What about ads for Louis Vuitton counterfeit bags and Viagra from overseas pharmacies? Or even conversations that use the words you’re searching for, but don’t reflect the meaning you’re going for. No, this irrelevant and distracting content will not be helpful.

It will be the opposite of helpful.

In social media monitoring, there are two ways to get a good base of data:

  1. Bring in broad data; validate and clean it to get the bulk of spam and irrelevance out, or
  2. Create kick-butt queries that bring in data that is all (well, mostly) pertinent. We aim for 90%+

Either way? You can start categorizing and slicing and dicing and digging for patterns and trends and pearls. The reality is, even at this point we always uncover more content that needs to be excluded. So we retool and refine. And the best argument for #2 (creating those kick-butt queries) is that you can get ongoing quality results – and you can refine the queries as you learn.

It’s all about continual improvement. (But that’s more than just a data conversation, right? I promise to come back and talk about that soon.)

Before embarking on analysis – social media or text analytics or anything, really – make sure you’re starting off with a good base.

Because really, it’s all about the base.

(I’m bringing data back..)

note

~Wendy

Filed Under: Social Listening

About Wendy Scherer

Wendy knew from her years as a partner with Bozell Worldwide that there was a great need for knowledge synthesis and business research that was more than a mere information dump. To address the market need for finding and digesting complex business research, she founded Scherer Cybrarian in 1995. The business grew and expanded over the years to include primary research, GIS, news aggregation and monitoring, and much more. But what she loved the most was the emerging world of social media research. (Don’t laugh. Everyone should love their work as much as Wendy does!) As this segment grew, it became apparent that this specialty could stand on its own to grow and change with the times. And so, The Social Studies Group was born in 2009.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Categories

The Social Studies Group thrives on good challenge. How can you use social media intelligence to your benefit?
We'll tell you - whether you hire us or not.

443-414-6367

Contact Us Today

We’ve been doing social media research since 1995. Not kidding.

Copyright © 2023 · The Social Studies Group · Privacy Policy