The political system needs to get to grips with social media as it is set to play a crucial role in all upcoming elections in the future.
According to Bob Savage, vice-president and managing director of EMC’s Centre of Excellence in Cork, the use of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn is generating a powerful data trail that is being used to profile the population.
The next general election could be fought as much on social media platforms as traditional print and broadcast outlets as politicians harness the raft of information people reveal about themselves and tailor their messages to voters’ habits, concerns and aspirations, according to EMC, the high-tech multinational that employs 2,500 people in Ireland.
“The huge amount of information people reveal about themselves through social media platforms is fast becoming a prized asset for data analysts seeking to identify lifestyle and behaviour patterns, as well as the issues that are really resonating with particular demographics.
“When captured, collated with data from other sources and then analysed using some of the technology industry’s most powerful new solutions, this information becomes gold dust, used to create and deliver specific insights and real-time intelligence that has never before been available.
“It will not be long until the political system catches up, mining such information to discover what voters like and dislike, the kind of lifestyles they lead, what influences their decisions, and the issues that concern them - and then honing their messages according to what the electorate want to hear,” said Mr Savage.
He added that data analysis, which allows organisations to cross-reference and compare large information sets, is becoming a major feature of the global information technology (IT ) landscape.
For example, retailers now have the ability to collate social networking information, blog content and analyst research with socio-demographic data to identify crucial buying trends and motivations for customer loyalty.
“Tomorrow’s mortgage bank will likely use GPS technology as a standard part of its risk assessment process, overlaying foreclosure and default data with the location of loans on Google Maps so that it can analyse its business in a geospatial context.
“Social media websites, smartphones and other consumer devices, including PCs and laptops, have allowed billions of people around the world to process huge amounts of information.
“The big social media platforms, which EMC supports through our backhaul IT infrastructure, are generating vast quantities of unstructured data as online conversations grow.
“The explosion in the volume of all this information - known in the IT world as ‘big data’ - has consequences for how it is to be captured, stored, managed and analysed.
“If Irish businesses and public sector organisations buy into the analytics space now, they will quickly turn IT into a tool to help them better understand the marketplace, developing new business opportunities and more tailored public policy responses,’ concluded Mr Savage.
