Simple Social Data

You don’t have to look far to find smart and influential people discussing the power and potential of social data. The thing is, “social data” is all a bit hand-wavy at the moment for most people. It’s hard to make the conceptual leap from knowing that there’s this amoeba of data in the cloud to thinking about how it can work in a practical setting.

As with all things, the reality is a whole lot simpler than the concept. I’ll give you an example of something we’ve done at the Parnassus Group. About a year ago, we helped manage a private screening of Adrian Grenier’s new movie Teenage Paparazzo for a group of social influencers in San Francisco.

In order to narrow down our selection of invited influencers, we used Topsy to search through the Twitter streams of the people on our list, looking for mentions of Adrian, his movie, or his hit HBO show Entourage.

With a few simple steps, and using only data that has been made explicitly publicly available (the contents of someone’s Tweets), we had turned a mostly random list of contacts and influencers in the Bay Area into a targeted list of known fans, to whom our outreach would be exciting and welcome.

That, in a nutshell, is Social Data.