Gaining Insights Through Metadata

June 26, 2013 Chad Bolender Leave a Comment

With the recent revelations of widespread surveillance by the NSA in the United States, the concept of metadata has been in the news lately. One of the controversial aspects is their collection of metadata about phone users and how revealing that can be without the content of the calls themselves. The answer, it turns out, is a lot.

The what and why of metadata

Literally “data about data,” Metadata is the descriptive information about content. They let you search for and pinpoint precise content that matters for market and competitive intelligence. It also allows broad analysis of the data as a whole.

The trouble with large amounts of data is well known. How do you draw conclusions from large amounts of data? How do you narrow it down to only what’s relevant to the task at hand?

Metadata is revealing

Metadata can give more valuable information than aggregated content by illuminating trends within that content. For a broad topic such as Microsoft, trend discovery without metadata is difficult. There’s just too much content to read. Metadata makes the process much more manageable.

For example, by doing a simple search for “Microsoft” in Newsdesk, I see that Don Mattrick and Xbox are mentioned often. This reflects the recent controversy over Microsoft’s Xbox One. We can break down what percentage of stories about Microsoft mention Xbox to get a different perspective:

We can also show that nearly all news coverage of Don Mattrick, President of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business, also mentions Xbox.

How it works

At Moreover, we are experts in metadata. We collect information about the publishing sites themselves, including topic, language, and location. For individual articles, we collect data about the author, time of publication, headline. Many metadata can be added using the article text, such as companies, people, and topics mentioned.

Each of the millions of postings that Moreover monitors gets over 50 pieces of metadata attached to them. This facilitates the generation of flexible and detailed reports of the trends across the data. In searches, robust metadata helps you zero in on exactly the news and social media you need.

The power of metadata

While the specifics differ on the metadata the NSA collects on cell phones and Moreover collects on internet articles, the underlying concepts are the same. This “data about the data” is key to gaining insight about lots of content.

Utilizing metadata effectively puts you at an advantage in analyzing, searching, and managing data. Want to learn more about how you can leverage valuable metadata for your company? Let’s talk.

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