Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Michael Wu, Chief Scientist at Lithium (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you double click down into each of those two cases and give us examples of what data you track and what kind of behavior you are trying to stimulate by tracking it?

Michael Wu: Both communities – whether it is the support community or the marketing community – run on our platform. On our platform we track every single behavior. In the support community you may want to reward people for answering people’s questions, whereas in the marketing community you may want to reward people for sharing and reading lots of content. The data we track is about all actions people take on our platform. If they click a “post message” button, it is tracked. If they give another person a “Like,” it is tracked as well. Everything you do on the platform is tracked. That is what we call behavioral data. If you share a post, there is no notion of what that message means. On our platform there are different types of messages – whether you share a message on our platform, share a message on our ideas engine, or write a blog.

SM: You have different contexts. One is support, the other marketing and then there are ideas or innovations. Why do you need context, then? If they are housed in different solutions, they don’t even need to be tracked because they are being rolled out differently. There are three different use cases here, and you have three different configurations. That is not really big data analytics.

MW: The consumer behavior on each one of our platforms is a very big data set.

SM: If I know that I have rolled out a Lithium marketing community on my website and you are tracking all this data, other than Likes, shares or posts, what are you tracking?

MW: There are 400 different types of metric that we track.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Michael Wu, Chief Scientist at Lithium
1 2 3 4 5