Social Media Analytics: Techniques and Insights for Extracting Business Value Out of Social Media

5. Social Data: Where and Why

Variety’s the very spice of life, That gives it all its flavor.

—William Cowper

When you think of the word data, what comes to mind?

At a very simplistic level, data is nothing more than a collection of facts, measurements, or observations that, when combined, form or create what we might call information. At its core, data is a raw, unorganized set of facts that need to be processed into something more meaningful. A set of numbers (or data points) such as those shown in Table 5.1 is relatively meaningless until we put them into context. The numbers 45.3, 39.1, 35.9, and so on mean nothing to us until we realize (from Table 5.2) that they are measurements of temperature. So, by combining data (values in a table) ...