Ask, Measure, Learn

Book excerpt: You can measure practically anything in the age of social media, but if you don’t know what you’re looking for, collecting mountains of data won’t yield a grain of insight. This non-technical guide shows you how to extract significant business value from big data with Ask-Measure-Learn, a system that helps you ask the right questions, measure the right data, and then learn from the results. Authors Lutz Finger and Soumitra Dutta originally devised this system to help governments and NGOs sift through volumes of data. With this book, these two experts provide business managers and analysts with a high-level overview of the Ask-Measure-Learn system, and demonstrate specific ways to apply social media analytics to marketing, sales, public relations, and customer management, using examples and case studies.