Hi there, here is the 20-minute audio of the keynote on “The State of the Social Data Revolution” at the 2011 Predictive Analytics World in San Francisco.
Would love to get your comments. Thanks!

The Office of the Mayor of San Francisco and the City’s Chief Information Officer are hosting an event that will change the way you think about data:

How the Social Data Revolution Changes (almost) Everything

Why do people share, what do people share?
And how does this influence their behavior?

Speaker: Andreas Weigend (@aweigend)
Location: One South Van Ness, 2nd Floor Atrium
Date: Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Time: The speech begins at 4pm, and is followed by a reception at 5pm, sponsored by Open-First.

youtube.com/socialdatarevolution
facebook.com/socialdatarevolution
wikipedia.org/wiki/social_data_revolution

Andreas Weigend studies people and the data they create and share. He works with companies that are eager to develop strategies to realize the untapped power of data, including Alibaba, Best Buy, Lufthansa, Nokia, and Thomson Reuters, and fun startups including San Francisco-based MrTweet.com and Skout.com (Boy Ahoy).  Previously, as the Chief Scientist of Amazon.com, he helped build the customer-centric, measurement-focused culture central to Amazon’s success. As a partner with San Francisco-based Open-First, he helps organizations absorb a set of insights based on data, mobile and social technologies.

Andreas teaches at Stanford and shares his insights at top conferences, such as the World Innovation Forum. He received his PhD from Stanford in physics, and lives in San Francisco, Shanghai, on weigend.com, and on Facebook.

Here are a few related press mentions (Summer 2010):

• Fast Company: Who are the New Influencers?
• London Evening Standard: Are these Online Nobodies the New Somebodies?
• NPR Marketplace: Data Mining Pushes Marketing to a New Level
• Minnesota Public Radio: Privacy… Just a Blip in History? and How Recommendations Now Use Entirely New Data Types e.g., Gotta Hunch?.

Hello, you can do four things with the speech I gave at the 2010 World Innovation Forum in New York:

1. Play or download the mp3 of the speech,

2. Leave your comments on the slides and see the annotations of others,

3. Leave your comments on the transcript and see the annotations of others, and

It was exciting to be part of the World Innovation Forum, an event packed with insights and a turnout of more than 800 thought leaders and a fantastic line-up of speakers. I had great company on stage, speaking between Chip Heath (who I went to grad school with) and Biz Stone (who co-founded Twitter).

I have put up the audio of my talk [mp3, 35 min, 32MB], the transcript [pdf | docx], and the slides [pdf | pptx]. And in terms of press commentary, check out what The Huffington Post, FastCompany, HSM, OnInnovation, and Steve Todd write about it, and please add your own thoughts via the comment box at the bottom of this post.

I am fortunate to present the insights on WIF2010 and the Social Data Revolution by two guest writers: Noah Burbank, a student in Stanford’s Social Data Revolution class this Spring, and Ted Shelton, the CEO of Open-First. And, as always, please do tell us what you think by leaving a comment below. Thanks!

WTF is WIF??

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We are excited that Ashvin Kumar, CEO of Blippy, will join the Social Data Revolution class this Thursday May 6, 2010. In preparation to what I expect to be a great discussion on the future of creating and sharing purchasing data, Dan Goodwin, Rob Cosgriff , and I created a 17-min mp3 with our thoughts on the game changing nature of the service. Please leave your comments here or on our facebook.com/socialdatarevolution page before class.

And here, added right after class, is the unedited 1h17min mp3 (72MB) of the lively discussion on broadcasting your finances and other taboos with Ashvin Kumar, ending with the longest applause this quarter so far.

PS: Somewhat related, I am giving a talk at the Intuit Innovation conference on May 3, and have put up pdf, pptx, and slideshare. If someone has good experiences liking the audio to the slides afterwards, please let me know.

On April 20, 2010, the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab held the event The Real Time Web: Imperative or Insanity? that I moderated. The packed, standing room only auditorium participated enthusiastically in the lively discussion of the panelists:

• Kevin Burton, CEO and founder, spinn3r
• Todd Levy, Head of Product and Engineering and co-founder, bit.ly
• Jan Pedersen, Chief Scientist for Core Search, Microsoft
• George Zachary, Partner, Charles River Ventures

For those who could not attend, Jeremy Carr (course assistant for MS&E237, Social Data Revolution) and I recorded a 12-minute audio summary of the key points of the event. I also posted my 3-page outline of the kick-off speech.

Please tell us what you think! Leave a comment below or on facebook.com/socialdatarevolution.

Thanks!

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Listen to the Conversation with Kai Ryssdal (Marketplace) on the Social Data Revolution: Companies get smart on Digital Data. Produced by American Public Media. Broadcast by NPR and Public Radio International on November 18, 200.

• Play (publicradio.org)
• Download (weigend.com, mp3, 2MB)

And please share what you think… Comment (via Facebook Connect) below!

Transcript (from http://bit.ly/dataNPR)

KAI RYSSDAL: The data trail that we create every day is only growing. Every time we go online, every time we use our cell phones, companies log our preferences. They make suggestions, and they remember what we do. Even though a lot of consumers have gotten used to that, a lot of businesses are still trying to figure out how to use our data to the best effect. One of the first companies to realize the social potential of consumer data was Amazon.com. And Andreas Weigend used to be the chief scientist there. Welcome to the program. Read the rest of this entry »

Download the mp3 of the World Marketing Forum keynote (45MB, 50 minutes, Mexico City, July 1, 2009).

Transcript:

Ladies and gentlemen, it is an honor for me to be here and to talk to you about what I think it the most interesting, the most exciting thing I can talk to you about. Read the rest of this entry »

On the eve of the launch of Geoffrey Miller’s book “Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior”, we discuss the key role of openness, the importance of dialogue, and the true reason for advertising. http://weigend.com/files/audio/GeoffreyMillerAndreasWeigend_2009.05.17.mp3

Geoffrey, a tenured professor at the University of New Mexico, combines an evolutionary framework with a data driven mindset to create insights about consumers. Openness, perhaps the least studied of the Big Five personality traits, and inherited to a large degree, is often underestimated. As we reflect on how our time as graduate students in Cognitive Psychology at Stanford has shaped us – Geoffrey worked with Roger Shepard and I with David Rumelhart — we discuss how marketers used to force-communicate customers, and got away with ignoring the deeply social characteristics of humans. Furthermore, Geoffrey explains, the traditional goal of advertising was to demonstrate to a few potential buyers the large symbolic significance of a product for the broad masses. Communication now having primarily become C2C, consumer to consumer, and C2W, consumer to world: what is the impact of the Social Data Revolution on advertising and consumer behavior?

This keynote, given on February 19, 2009 at Predictive Analytics World shows how predictive models can benefit from the Social Data Revolution [pptx | mp3]

Abstract:Technology affords companies unprecedented opportunities to interact with customers and employees. In any of these interactions, data is created. Yet most firms neither capture nor fully utilize those data to impact their bottom line and strengthen relationships with their customers. Product recommendations and behavioral targeting are early examples of leveraging new sources of data to predict customer behavior and preferences. The next iteration of these interactions, for example mobile phones, empowers owners to access richer data and discover new opportunities – with the possible inclusion of location data that enables companies to predict mobility patterns for marketing and planning purposes. Learn from the former Chief Scientist of Amazon.com how to create a comprehensive data strategy through:

• Leveraging the data you’re already collecting, but not using
• Identifying data that you could and should be collecting
• Transforming data to next-generation predictive intelligence

In this heated discussion recorded on a freezing trolley ride at the annual Monitor Talent meeting, Dan Ariely, Alaina Love, and Andreas Weigend debate the irrationalities in customer decision making:

• How can you “instrument the world” (Weigend) to capture these irrationalities via the plethora of digital traces users leave behind (“attention stream”, Weigend)?
• What are the underlying principles to design incentives (“The Contract”, Ariely) such that consumers share with you valuable information about their intentions?  (“Valuable to Whom?!?”, Love). And, to what degree do people actually know what they want?
• How can companies delight customers by helping them discover items they are genuinely interested in?
• And by capturing rich interactions in addition to mere transactions: How can “move upstream” (Weigend) to delight and truly support the decision making process of the customer?

Leave a comment and let us know what you think!