Beer & BigData at the Seattle Marketing Analytics Meetup

A huge THANK YOU to the eSage Group, Tina Munro and Duane Bedard for organizing the rather unique meetup last week at J&M Café. This was part of the eSage Group's Seattle Marketing Analytics Pub Series. The location was in what's listed as Seattle’s oldest bar: J&M Café in Pioneer Square. Details of the meetup: LINK 

Nice turnout to hear @5h15h at tonight's Seattle Marketing #Analytics Meetup! #bigdata pic.twitter.com/VKtFZRsbEu

— Tina Munro (@TinaMunro) May 20, 2015

Also, Thank you to those that attended the session and for the engaging conversations around Retail, Analytics and interesting uses of Data. The theme was how combining data from different sources provides unique insights and enables interesting business models. We talked about several interesting use cases of data including:

  1. Filling in Gaps in Insight using Data Collaborations
  2. The unintended use of Wearables data 
  3. Combining Weather & Sales data to determine inventory
  4. Using geotagged photos to determine popular tourist destinations in cities
  5. Using Cellphone data to determine population movements and popular destinations during weekends.
  6. Combining Data from multiple sources to de-anonymize data.
  7. Matching information about truck shipments with data about the movement of the vehicles can provide information about rapid changes in the economy
  8. The Lipstick effect and correlation of sales to economic indicators

Here is the slide deck that I used for the presentation: https://bit.ly/1HhgbLI 

Combining Data Sets for Better Customer Insights from ShiSh Shridhar

For the session, I built out a demo using Power BI, to illustrate how I could gain more information by layering in data from multiple sources. I started off by using Power Query to pull in real time data of Seattle 911 calls. The data is easily available via: https://bit.ly/1GoBdMW. With the Seattle 911 data, I could easily plot out incidents in Seattle by type and time:

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Using the Instagram API, Twitter data, Foursquare/Swarm API, I added additional layers of detail onto the map to get more detail into what was going on in Seattle in near real time. Here is a short clip of a video walkthrough of some of the data layers shown using Power Map for Excel: