Sean McGrath writes about ‘Social media and BIG data’
Social media is many things to many people. To the vast majority of society it is a means of communicating with friends and family, of rekindling old friendships and, on occasion, quasi-obsessively stalking former partners.
To the search engines, social media has become the cohesive glue that ties all of the algorithms together. Nothing can gauge the importance of web content quite as effectively as social media.
To the marketers, social media is way to regain the upper hand in the never ending tussle for web presence. The search engines and society both place more emphasis on social media now than almost any other web channel.
To journalists, social media is rapidly becoming a news channel in its own right. The Guardian has just launched GuardianWitness which gives citizen journalists an international platform.