Thought Leaders in Big Data: Dmitri Williams, Professor USC and CEO of Ninja Metrics (Part 7)

Dmitri Williams: It took that Jujitsu lateral thinking to think that their relationship is more important than my relationship with them. That’s a lot of the evangelization that we have to do. We are very early in this process and we have a lot of theory and some early best practice but we don’t know if that thinking works well in healthcare.

Sramana Mitra: Also I think that, sector by sector, the action items are different. Just like you gave the example of the coffee shop, once you understand the social graph, the action items of what you do with that understanding varies from business to business or sector to sector.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast (Part 1)

We don’t often see significant global cloud technology companies being built out of London. Mimecast is an exception and is likely to go public in the near term. This conversation highlights the activities of a major player in the cloud-based enterprise email system space.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to Mimecast and yourself.

Peter Bauer: I’m the CEO and co-founder of Mimecast. I’m originally from South Africa but moved to the UK in 2002. I set up Mimecast, which is headquartered in London, with my co-founder who is also a South African. The business today has grown to an >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Dmitri Williams, Professor USC and CEO of Ninja Metrics (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What about stuff like Facebook pages, LinkedIn connections, and Facebook followers? Are those part of the system?

Dmitri Williams: Yes. Anything that our API collects is fair game here. You could, for example, have a system with multiple types of edges and connections and we have to think through that carefully, deal with it, and automate it. Any time we can link two people together, we’re happy. When we have more than one type, it leads to better model accuracy.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Dmitri Williams, Professor USC and CEO of Ninja Metrics (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When you’re working within an industry sector where the data is all self-sufficient like a video game industry, that’s obvious. What is the state of the union in other sectors? What percentage of the e-commerce clients that you have are actually using social sign-in and trying to marry social graph data with their transaction data?

Dmitri Williams: Certainly, none of them are trying to do this. This is not on anyone’s radar. I’m educating and evangelizing as I go. For the most part, when we walk in, the answer to your question is do they have social sign in, and what percentage of their user >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Dmitri Williams, Professor USC and CEO of Ninja Metrics (Part 4)

Dmitri Williams: I have no idea if I impacted sales because I have 10,000 followers. I don’t know if I have generated $1 or $3 million. I’ve got no clue. It’s all an assumption. You’re really looking at a proxy for action. Any marketer with their head on straight would rather have proof. What we do is much more difficult but it results in proof. We are not a business-to-consumer technology. We are a business-to-business technology, which means that we have the buying data. We will connect the social graph to get that social whale phenomenon measured. We will connect it to the actual purchases or actual buying of tickets. We will link those two sources of data together – the social and the behavioral. As a result, our scores aren’t scores. They’re in the units that the company cares about.

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Dmitri Williams, Professor USC and CEO of Ninja Metrics (Part 3)

Dmitri Williams: We had a model which started explaining these social influence ripple effects, and catch what we call social whales. These are people who may or may not have a lot of behavior on their own but clearly are causing the behavior of others. That’s where the commercial stuff starts to become much more interesting and obvious. If you know who the largest influencers are in a social system, this is extremely useful on a business model side for acquisition, retention, and for monetization. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Dmitri Williams, Professor USC and CEO of Ninja Metrics (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Maybe pick three client use cases who have these large amounts of data. Let’s double-click down on understanding specifically what that data contains and what kinds of intelligence are you able to derive out of it. What processes and methodologies have you innovated to bring that together?

Dmitri Williams: Let’s start with an academic one and maybe jump into some commercial ones. The first project that we did was on predictive analytics and we were doing this for the intelligence community. They were interested in looking at someone’s online behavior and understanding something about them offline. Those are all declassified stuff that you can read about online. We would take a look at someone playing a video game like EverQuest 2, which is the game that we were looking at most of the time. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Dmitri Williams, Professor USC and CEO of Ninja Metrics (Part 1)

Today, social behavior and transaction data are seldom correlated to fully understand the social graph of customers that can lead to business strategy decisions like special handling of key influencers. While social media offers some insights into key influencers, such correlation with transactional data and behavioral data would take that to the next level.

Read this discussion with Dmitri Williams to understand where we’re going.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to you and give some context about what vantage point you’re looking at the Big Data world from.

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