Data Impact from Social Media - review of an in-class presentation from SocialFlow

It is really fortunate to have Gilad Lotan, VP of SocalFlow doing a Skype in-class presentation in my Business Intelligence class this week. He is an amazing young professional that has a great passion in finding out relationship, causality, and facts behind raw data. His presentation was also informative by explaining some basic ideas for gathering raw data from twitter API then moving on to methodologies used in analyzing data. The entire presentation was vivid, thanks for his rich and various format of graphics and illustrations.

Although I came across some interesting articles covering the use of social media, I never actually understand the impact social media. Gilad is really an expert in this field. He used many historical events to illustrate why the study of these social media data is important. For example, he mentioned in the presentation that last year New York earthquake event. The people in Richmond, VA first discovered the event and started to tweet online. It is unbelievable even in earthquake, people are still tweeting each other. The tweets spread out very fast that everyone is able to see. It is reasonable that people in New York also noticed that tweet content. Approximately 2 minutes later, the earthquake hit New York and people in New York started to tweet. This fact was clearly reflected in Gilad's network analysis. If this approach could be carried out in real time, it is possible to help people in New York predict the earthquake for about 2 minutes earlier. This is so amazing that 2 minutes is long enough for people find shelters and protect themselves.

There are other interesting topics covered in the presentation, but the earthquake prediction is the one that attracts me the most. The realm of social media is not narrowed at usage level any more. It is right now broadened into a higher impact level that can actually discover, help, and change the world.