How BI and Data Analytics Pros Use Twitter

Trends and Outliers

TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog

02/08
2013

How BI and Data Analytics Pros Used Twitter in the Past Month

It’s been a little while since we’ve brought you a Twitter wrap and we have lots in store in the form of awards, interesting reads and a few cool things to check out. Let’s start with what happens when the lights go out at the Superdome.

Data Geeks & the Super Bowl on Twitter

This writer was highly entertained by @datachick’s play-by-play of the super #fail. Best Tweet? There were two of them – “Agile #SuperBowl. Just enough power” and “I’m pretty sure Nate Silver predicted this.”

Another trending topic related to the Super Bowl was the geek love fest presented by companies like GoDaddy and KIA. But the real story about love and geeks comes to us on Twitter via the MIT Sloan Management Review (@mitsmr).

It seems that some data geeks (a CEO at Match.com and a researcher studying romantic love for the past 30 years) have found a match made in the cloud – combining personal opinions with algorithms and personality types to produce an answer to a burning question: “Why do you fall in love with one person and not the other?”

You can find out more about the fascinating data analytics of why we select certain people to love and how you can use the personality types identified in the study to “understand yourself, colleagues and clients” here.

Stats We Learned from Twitter in Data Analytics

The Obama campaign had 154 data analytics people on staff versus Romney’s four via NY Times reporter Jonathan Weisman (@jonathanweisman).
“Romney team says it had about 25 data/analytics staff (not four) in-house. Obama had 150,” tweets Amanda Terkel (@akertel), senior political reporter at the Huffington Post.
Data analytics is the No. 4 “most sought tech skill” behind Java, mobile and .NET, Dice reports via KDNuggets (@kdnuggets). See more on his predictions for 2013 and the “slow death” of big data.
“Data centers, cloud, data analytics to drive 2013: report (SlashDataCenter),” via Slashdot (@slashdot), an “automated storytelling homepage with an intentionally obnoxious URL.” (Hint: Read the URL aloud and then read the report on what’s driving tech in 2013.)

More Interesting Finds on Big Data and Data Analytics from Twitter

Sherlock Holmes would use data analytics to “outsmart” criminals and competition. Spotfire partner Attivio’s product marketing director Mike Urbonas (@mikeurbonas) has a cool post that explores the continued cultural fascination with Sherlock Holmes. In addition, he shares how a Holmes mindset applies to big data analytics and information management. We especially love this point: “Like Sherlock Holmes, we all want to make sense of seemingly unrelated information and ‘be smarter than everyone else’ — or at least outsmart the competition, outsmart criminals and fraudsters, outsmart seemingly intractable business problems.”
Why data analytics reveals the “devil in the details” – This great post from the Association of Certified Fraud Investigators (@theacfe) tells a compelling story of why data analytics is necessary and not that difficult to manage at the company or agency level. It also includes a checklist for developing a data analytics process.

As always, here’s your complete list of “go-follows” for BI and data analytics pros:

Amanda Brandon
Spotfire Blogging Team