Data Crunch

Social Media and Machine Learning

11.21.2019 - By Data Crunch CorporationPlay

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How do you build a comprehensive view of a topic on social media? Jordan Breslauer would say you let a machine learning tool scan the social sphere and add information as conversations evolve, with help from humans in the loop.Ginette Methot: I’m Ginette,Curtis Seare: and I’m Curtis,Ginette: and you are listening to Data Crunch,Curtis: a podcast about how applied data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are changing the world.Ginette: Data Crunch is produced by the Data Crunch Corporation, an analytics training and consulting company.Ginette: Many of you want to gain a deeper understanding of data science and machine learning, and Brilliant.org is a great place to dig deeper into these topics. Their classes help you understand algorithms, machine learning concepts, computer science basics, probability, computer memory, and many other important concepts in data science and machine learning. The nice thing about Brilliant.org is that you can learn in bite-sized pieces at your own pace. Their courses have storytelling, code-writing, and interactive challenges, which makes them entertaining, challenging, and educational.Sign up for free and start learning by going to Brilliant.org slash Data Crunch, and also the first 200 people that go to that link will get 20% off the annual premium subscription.Let’s get into our conversation with Jordan Breslauer, senior director of data analytics and customer success at social standards. Jordan: My name is Jordan Breslauer. I'm the senior director of data analytics and customer success at social standards. I've always been a data geek as it pertains to sports. I think of Moneyball when I was younger, I always wanted to be kind of a the next Billy Bean and I, when I started working for sports franchises right after high school and early college days, I just realized that, that type of work culture is wasn't for me, but I was so, so into trying to answer questions with data that had no previously clear answer, you know? I loved answering subjective questions like, or what makes the best player or how do, how do I know who the best player is? And I thought what was always fun was to try and bring some sort of structured subjectivity to those sorts of questions through using data. And that's really what got me passionate about data in the first place. But then I just started to apply it to a number of different business questions that I always thought were quite interesting, which have a great deal of subjectivity. And that led me to Nielsen originally where my main question that I was answering on a day-to-day basis, what was, what makes a great ad? Uh, what I found though is that advertising at least, especially as it pertains to TV, is really where brands were moving away from and a lot of the real consumer analytics that people were looking for were trying to underpin people in their natural environment, particularly on social media. And I hadn't seen any company that had done it well. Uh, and I happened to meet social standards during my time at Nielsen and was truly just blown away with this ability to essentially take a large input of conversations that people were happening or happening, I should say, and bring some sort of structure to them to actually be able to analyze them and understand what people were talking about as it pertained to different types of topics. And so I think that's really what brought me here was the fascination with this huge amount of data behind the ways that people were talking about on social. And the fact that it had some structure to it, which actually allowed for real analytics to be put behind it. Curtis: It's a hard thing to do though. Right? You know, to answer this question of how do we extract real value or real insight from social media and you'd mentioned historically or up to this point, companies that that are trying to do that missed the mark.

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