Every.
Single.
Thing.
You.
Post.
In a time when schools administrators, counselors, and teachers talk to students about thinking before they post anything on social media, it may come as a surprise that it is often the parents, not the kids, who are wearing their heart on their digital sleeve. From posting political memes to tracking progress on a St. Patty’s Day bar crawl, adults are often more likely to post their opinions and their locations. For while it seems like the novelty of constant posting seems to be of less interest to teens, many adults are obsessed.
It should come as no surprise then that there is an entire industry built around mining this digital data. From opinion mining to smart geotagging, marketing teams can help their clients find out a large amount of information about anyone who uses social media. And in today’s world where there is a great divide between the opinions that Americans have on a variety of topics. Gun control. School safety. Taxes. Government decisions. Based on the articles and comments that many Americans post, it is actual fairly easy to discern a certain number of products that might be of interest to a certain profile. With the use of opinion mining and semantic extraction software engines, in fact, marketing teams can help their clients target the best matched online customers for both products and services.
Consider some of these facts and figures about the data mining industry and the impact that it has on the nation’s economy:
- Information retrieval, natural language processing, information extraction, and data mining are the four steps in the text mining process.
- $3 billion is the current value of the text analytic market. That number, however, is forecasted to reach almost $6 billion by the year 2020.
- Producing an enormous amount of data every second, Facebook has 1.97 billion monthly active users worldwide.
- Less than 1% of digital data is ever analyzed, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC). Text mining cis the process that can bridge the gap to the missing 99% of untapped data.
- Entity resolution is the practice of finding and linking mentions of the same entity within and across data sets.
- The three primary tasks involved in entity resolution are deduplication, record linkage, and canonicalization.
The fact that everything that you post can be collected and analyzed is an indicator of how much digital data there is available. Is your company taking advantage of this information to direct your marketing? See this link for more references.