The State Department Delves into Social Media
October 13, 2015
People and companies that want to increase a form of communication between people create social media platforms. Facebook was invented to take advantage of the digital real-time environment to keep people in contact and form a web of contacts. Twitter was founded for a more quick and instantaneous form of communication based on short one hundred forty character blurbs. Instagram shares pictures and Pinterest connects ideas via pictures and related topics. Using analytics, the social media companies and other organizations collect data on users and use that information to sell products and services as well as understanding the types of users on each platform.
Social media contains a variety of data that can benefit not only private companies, but the government agencies as well. According to GCN, the “State Starts Development On Social Media And Analytics Platform” to collaborate and contribute in real-time to schedule and publish across many social media platforms and it will also be mobile-enabled. The platform will also be used to track analytics on social media:
“For analytics, the system will analyze sentiment, track trending social media topics, aggregate location and demographic information, rank of top multimedia content, identify influencers on social media and produce automated and customizable reports.”
The platform will support twenty users and track thirty million mentions each year. The purpose behind the social media and analytics platform is still vague, but the federal government has proven to be behind in understanding and development of modern technology. This appears to be a step forward to upgrade itself, so it does not get left behind. But a social media platform that analyzes data should have been implemented years ago at the start of this big data phenomenon.
Whitney Grace, October 13, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph