EMC Plunges Into Data – And All The Potential That Lies Within It
Davis
PHOTO/COURTESY
Mike Foley, director of data and insight at Hopkinton-based EMC, at the opening of the company's Marketing Science Lab earlier this year in Santa Clara, Calif.
It's easy to dismiss Twitter as a useless outlet for the self-absorbed to talk about brushing their teeth.
After all, how thoughtful can a tweet be when it's limited to 140 characters?
But taken in aggregate, Twitter is a powerful tool to understand the human condition — everything including how we feel about our politicians, our celebrities, our economy and ourselves.
That's a lesson Michael Foley, director of data and insight at Hopkinton-based EMC, has learned firsthand.
Last month, EMC announced (via Twitter, of course) the opening of its Marketing Science Lab at its Santa Clara, Calif., campus, where it uses EMC servers to comb through data and find insights to demonstrate the power of Big Data. The lab, led by Foley, has two purposes. On the one hand, it can take EMC data from a variety of sources to help the company better market its products. On the other hand, the lab can be used for more general demonstrations to show off the technology and help close the sale for a big client. Foley helped set up the lab after he joined EMC last year. Prior to that, he spent more than a decade at Cisco, where he specialized in advanced analytics.
The EMC data lab team has dug into Twitter, analyzing 1 billion Twitter posts as part of a larger project called "The Human Face of Data," which includes a hardcover book (find out more at humanfaceofdata.com). By text mining, or analyzing the tweets, they were able to see how Americans feel about their overall health, how residents of Singapore feel about traffic (very frustrated, apparently) and how Brazilians feel about Major League Baseball (pretty good).
"The Human Face of Data" project looked at a variety of topics around the globe, including health and business. One of the more interesting nuggets they managed to pull from the Twitter data is the fact that overall sentiments around business in the United States were negative during the period analyzed. In China, however, sentiments were positive. The country with the most negative sentiment? Italy.
An Internal Focus, Too
Of course, EMC isn't just interested in what people in Italy are saying on Twitter. They're also interested in what their customers are saying about their products or about technology in general. And they bet their customers are interested in such insights, too.
For Foley, sifting through all this data isn't a dry science.
"There's an art to working with data that's so large," he said, explaining that the datasets his team is working with include 1,000 tables with 400 million rows and 100 columns. That's pretty big Big Data.
And their goal isn't simply to produce more spreadsheets. The finished product of their work is often a data visualization, or graphic representation of the information, that makes it easier to be interpreted. For example, Foley said that if they're reviewing a global product campaign for EMC, they'll often take their data and create a map that shows where their best and worst customers are.
"When you see it on a map to make decisions, it's so much easier," he said. "It just really resonates."
Beyond The Data
Foley is also responsible for helping improve EMC's data quality overall.Because as any data geek will explain, your insights are only as good as the data you have to begin with.
"I've done data strategy in every company I've been in," Foley said. "Big and small, everyone has challenges with data quality. In fact, from an analytics perspective, 90 percent of analysis is data preparation."
Foley said every company can gain insights from their data, provided they collect it and organize it. A simple customer list, if complete can have tremendous value, he said, noting that a startup he once worked for was sold not for the technology but for the customer database it had compiled.
"Data itself has monetary value," he said.
And a big budget isn't required. "It's not all about how much you spend… It's about the discipline and knowledge of how to set things up… If you're aware of those things, it doesn't cost anything, you just gain."
______________
Got news for Digital Diva? Email Christina H. Davis at cdavis@wbjournal.com.
Read more
WBJ Talk Back: Email Annoyances, Slots In Worcester
10 Fearless 2013 Predictions: Hello Collaboration, Goodbye Google +
Google’s Answer To Microsoft Office Gains Ground
Big Data Presents Big Opportunities, Challenges
Restaurants' Recipe For Success: Get Smarter
EMC Increases Share Buyback Program
Find Out What's On Customers' Minds: 7 Tips To Building Online Surveys
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments