Social Media Data Mining – A Complex Task

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If you have come here looking for algorithms, there is no need to stay. Nothing I am about to say is based on any sort of scientific fact or evidence. This post is purely born from observation and frustration. One of the very cool aspects of today’s applications is their ability to discover, extract, and aggregate data regarding an individual person or company. In the world of Social CRM, this is becoming more and more important but, it ain’t easy and some programs are better at it than others. Frankly, I’ve yet to find one that does it to the degree necessary for me to be entirely comfortable with the results. Data mining is a incredibly complex task and here are a couple of the reasons why ….

  1. It appears as though the universal connecting pin within social media is your email address. How many of us only have one email address? I probably have 7-10.  However, when it comes to social media, I use one and one only. Why? Because part of social media, for me, is wanting to be found and I want to make it as easy as possible for folks to do so. I also want them to see my complete social profile and it is very difficult to aggregate that when you use multiple email addresses. A few social media apps may allow for multiple addresses, but not all.
  2. Certain applications will hide your email addresses based either by design or by user choice. For example, on Twitter you may choose whether or not to have your email address be made available in a people search.

The problem is, I want data mining in my SCRM and too much info beats the heck out of no info. Think about it. I have something like 2,500 contacts in my database and would I prefer to manually search for and enter each of their Twitter, FaceBook, and LinkedIn credentials or have this task performed for me automatically? Not a difficult decision. Here is how I have seen different applications attempt to accomplish this process …..

  1. Find and use whatever they can and hope that it is the correct selection. If it is not, you may or may not have the ability to manually edit that with the correct information. What you see is too often what you get. Not good.
  2. If they can’t find any networks (or certain ones), you may or may not be able to add those in yourself. Don’t ask me why but FaceBook seems to be particularly challenging for a number of applications.
  3. They will look at incoming emails and gather whatever info they can from within the body of the email particularly signature lines that often include phone numbers and websites and more. What seems to also happen is that, when they see that phone number, they assume that it belongs to that contact even though it may have been the phone for another person that is being shared with you via that email. Xobni on my BlackBerry, unfortunately, does this with amazing regularity.
  4. Certain applications, BatchBook and Xobni being two of them, will look for social network connections and provide you several possible matches and ask you to choose. While not the full automation that would be preferable, this method does perhaps have it’s advantages. Still, where they come up with some of my choices is way beyond me. I often see zero connection.
  5. Right now, as I await the full introduction of Nimble, I may run two or more social media add-on applications in my Gmail. Why? Because each seems adept at finding information that the other does not.

I do think that either through data mining or by giving the user to have the ability to register multiple email addresses for a particular contact, and by having the service search by all addresses on record, this would be a huge plus. Finally, applications that both mine and sync do need to do a better job at recognizing relationships between sources of information and existing contact accounts. For example, it is not unusual to have a contact established, have a new Twitter account imported, and not have the application recognize that this Twitter account needs to be attached to this contact. Groan …. if this were easy, I’d be doing it (smile).

Thanks for visiting!

Craig

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Craig M. Jamieson

Craig M. Jamieson

Managing Member at Adaptive Business Services
Craig M. Jamieson is a lifelong B2B salesperson, manager, owner, and a networking enthusiast. Adaptive Business Services provides solutions related to the sales professional. We are a Nimble CRM Solution Partner. Craig also conducts training and workshops primarily in social selling and communication skills. Craig is also the author of "The Small Business' Guide to Social CRM", now available on Amazon!
Craig M. Jamieson

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