The benefits of integrating social data into your existing business CRM data are tangible and plentiful. Social media is powerful, but it is ten times more informative and actionable when combined with traditional media, existing systems and emerging technologies like mobile. In this final post in our series we will look at the fifth and most cost prohibitive challenge for businesses integrating social media if they choose to do it on their own.
For reference, in part 1, we looked at the challenges of enormous social data volumes that can easily overwhelm enterprise systems and put the rest of their organization at risk. In part 2, the difficulties of managing unstructured social data as well as the new methods and standards of accessing social data were addressed. In the last post, part 3, we covered the challenges of cleaning, organizing and enriching social data to make it useful and meaningful. Let’s take a look at the fifth of the most notable challenges to integrating social media data into your business and how Visible® can help. Read more…
Never Done Learning: How I Became a Machine Learning Enthusiast
Posted by Lucas Parker on December 15, 2011Summary: Encouraged by Shawn Rutledge, Chief Scientist at Visible Technologies, several engineers within the company participated in Stanford’s free online Machine Learning course. Lucas Parker, Lead Software Development Engineer at Visible, relates his experiences as a newcomer to machine learning, comparing them to the challenges of social media monitoring. Additionally, both Shawn and Lucas take part in an online machine learning competition, showing that experience is a significant factor in the effectiveness of building and applying the sorts of analytical models that bring value to Visible’s customers.
It was September 9th of this year that Shawn Rutledge, Chief Scientist and head of the Core Technology team at Visible, gave the clarion call to our engineering team to participate in Stanford’s forthcoming experiment in online learning – namely the Machine Learning class taught by Professor Andrew Ng. A few of us heard the call and rushed into a learning experience that drew us into a discipline outside the typical realm of software engineering. Shawn organized the email discussion group and helped to answer questions along the way as we all became neophytes in the esoteric field that helps to differentiate Visible Technologies in the budding industry of social media monitoring and analytics.