What is a predictor for a political candidate’s success? It is in the millions of tweets about the contest.
What will get more customers to buy? It is in getting them to like your brand’s facebook page.
How can you get your message across? It is by getting all your employees tweeting in unison.
What is a predictor of getting your tweet retweeted? The secret is in using more adverbs (or is it adjectives)
When Stephen Hawking wrote about our early models about the universe he wrote,
Ignorance of nature’s ways led people in ancient times to postulate many myths in an effort to make sense of their world. According to Viking mythology, eclipses occur when two wolves, Skoll and Hati, catch the sun or moon. At the onset of an eclipse people would make lots of noise, hoping to scare the wolves away.
If you look at it Bigdata of these days is no different from what those Vikings in early days did trying to understand eclipse. Bigdata or not is defined not by volume (ok velocity, variety) but by our ability to process with tools at our disposal and how advanced our mind and reasoning is. It is not farfetched to say, our early ancestors when bombarded with cosmic data saw that as Bigdata problem, trying to make some sense out of it with myths.
Hawking was very optimistic and forgiving by adding that
Today we use reason, mathematics and experimental test—in other words, modern science.
Today we have no scarcity of data, we have abundance of it – billions of tweets, facebook updates, instagram pictures – all volume, variety and velocity. Do we really use reason, (right )mathematics and experimental test to make sense of this social media noise?
May be Hawking is true in case of science but not in social media science, data science or in so called science of marketing. If not would be seeing any of those statements we saw in the beginning of this article, propagated as “scientifically proven” methods and retweeted by millions?
Iterative Path 