What do your Facebook likes say about you?

Jennifer Golbeck explains how companies are using the data you voluntarily put out there onto social media sites as a way to found out more about your patterns of behaviour. She explains how companies can find out your:

• political preference
• personality score
• religion
• intelligence
• sexual orientation

She explains how a study by the National Academies found one of the strongest Facebook indicators of intelligence was to like the page for Curly Fries. (now you understand the title, right?)

If companies can grasp which “likes” are associated with which attributes and characteristics it means they can use this data to better market their products or services. This big data source shouldn’t be overlooked by organisations, as the worlds internet population and in turn Facebook population continues to grow the research available will become ever more important to digital marketing.

Jennifer Golbeck, (2013). The curly fry conundrum: why social media “likes” say more than you might think. [Online Video]. 01 October. Available from: http://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_golbeck_the_curly_fry_conundrum_why_social_media_likes_say_more_than_you_might_think

[Accessed: 23 October 2014].

This blog is based on an article I read recently by (Juha et al, 2012) called “The Mobile Data Challenge: Big Data for Mobile Computing Research”

The increase in sensors attached to smart phones has led to a revolution in the data collected and created a new research domain across computing and social science. While collecting such data requires extensive effort and investment the article states that open data sharing with the wider research community is possible.

This present a massive marketing opportunity for companies who can get hold of such data sets. Some examples that the study sets out are investigating human behavior and the correlation between external events such as weather. E.g. a shopping centre could track the movement of humans on a summer day vs a winter day to influence their seasonal marketing campaigns.

As the article states, regulations for privacy and data protection play a fundamental role in in protecting all sensitive aspects of mobile data.

This is just a tiny snippet of the article so for an interesting read look up:

Laurila, Juha K., Daniel Gatica-Perez, Imad Aad, Jan Blom, Olivier Bornet, Trinh-Minh-Tri Do, Olivier Dousse, Julien Eberle, and Markus Miettinen. “The mobile data challenge: Big data for mobile computing research.” In Proceedings of the Workshop on the Nokia Mobile Data Challenge, in Conjunction with the 10th International Conference on Pervasive Computing, pp. 1-8. 2012.