Market Research Meets Big Data Analytics for LinkedIn

Sally Sadosky (Group Manager, Market Research) and Al
Nevarez (Senior Manager, Business Analytics) led a thought-provoking
presentation on how LinkedIn is leveraging their pool of data to transform
their product. As you can imagine, the amount of data LinkedIn has on its members
is vast. As an added complexity, the LinkedIn product is not targeted toward
one business group. Their challenge is to use the data to optimize two sides of
the same coin ' B2C (members) and B2B (advertisers).

Sally Sadosky walked the audience through their ETL (Extraction
Transformation and Loading) process and how they ultimately develop a single
relational database. By transforming their data into a relational database,
LinkedIn is able to ask very specific questions (slicing the data). This allows
them to answer questions in the context of business needs and customer
experience (e.g. 'What is the satisfaction with our new messaging tool for
members who had it enabled'?).

One key advantage LinkedIn has is the ability to keep their
surveys very short because they already have the behavior data (they already
know what people are doing on their platform).

A few of the big data tools they use regularly include:

Hadoop

Hive

Pig

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Isaiah Adams is the Manager of Social Media Development at Optimization Group, a marketing research and analytics firm that uses cutting edge technology to help clients make fact-based decisions. Follow Optimization Group on Twitter @optimizationgrp