Ask, Measure, Learn

You can measure practically anything in the age of social media, but if you don’t know what you’re looking for, collecting mountains of data won’t yield a grain of insight. This non-technical guide shows you how to extract significant business value from big data with Ask-Measure-Learn, a system that helps you ask the right questions, measure the right data, and then learn from the results.

Authors Lutz Finger and Soumitra Dutta originally devised this system to help governments and NGOs sift through volumes of data. With this book, these two experts provide business managers and analysts with a high-level overview of the Ask-Measure-Learn system, and demonstrate specific ways to apply social media analytics to marketing, sales, public relations, and customer management, using examples and case studies.

LUTZ FINGER, a director at LinkedIn, is an authority on social media and text analytics. He’s also co-founder and former CEO of Fisheye Analytics, a media data-mining company whose products support governments and various NGOs, such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the International Olympic Committee, which was acquired by the WPP group.

Lutz is a highly regarded technology executive who built a sales center for Dell Europe as well as an incubator for mobile applications at Ericsson. He is a popular public speaker on business analytics and serves as an advisor and board member at several data-centric corporations in Europe and the US. He has an MBA from INSEAD as well as an MS in quantum physics from TU Berlin (Germany).

SOUMITRA DUTTA, an authority on the impact of new technology on business, is the dean of the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University. Previously he was a Professor at INSEAD, a leading graduate business school. He is also co-founder and former Chairman of Fisheye Analytics.