Data Analysis with Social Mention and Google Trends: Lab Worksheet 2

This assignment solution explores the use of Social Mention and Google Trends for big data analysis. The student analyzes the effectiveness of Social Mention for brand research, highlighting its ability to aggregate data from various platforms and provide detailed reports, while also pointing out its limitations, such as the lack of Facebook data and potential for irrelevant search results. The solution also examines Google Trends, discussing its utility in comparing topics geographically and over time, and its limitations in terms of result transparency and accuracy. Furthermore, the assignment addresses ethical issues related to data objectivity, accuracy, and privacy, particularly concerning the use of Google Trends data. The student provides insights into the practical applications and drawbacks of each tool, offering a comprehensive overview of their usage in data-driven research.

Running head: LAB WORKSHEET 2
Lab Worksheet 2
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

1LAB WORKSHEET 2
PART2: Big Data
1. Social mention
(a) Outline some of your findings and/or how this might be useful to research an aspect of
your topic.
Solution: Social Mention is useful in the way that it provides results from across the world
on a single platform. The search on Swinburne shows that Social Mention is great to know about
most recent comments whether positive, negative or neutral. Another search on Starbucks shows
that, a brand like Starbucks is having 0% passion. This result shows that Starbucks is a huge
brand and less comments on this brand is not justified. Social Mention provides every minute
detail such as where the brand is mentioned and by which time through RSS feed. This search
tool is helpful to give a deep report on a brand considering all social media platforms where
users comment. Social Mention helps to analyze any brand popularity and comments across
various platforms hassle free without any complexity. The above two searches shows that Social
Mention is a great tool for researching a brand due to large data aggregated from several
platforms. Social Mention is useful in terms of various filter options that it provides.
(b) What would be the limitations?
Solution: The limitations of Social Mention are associated with the results it provides in
return to searches. The results are limited to Twitter only and there is no Facebook result which is
a largest social media platform. The searched topics, Swinburne and Starbucks, does not yield
results from Facebook and other platforms, only Twitter result is shown. Some of the posts on
Social Mention are not relevant and it is misleading also. The results on Twitter are not evident

2LAB WORKSHEET 2
based as some people have posted unnecessary comments. The video of the searched topics
showed errors and video was not available.
2. Google Trends
(a) Outline some of your findings and/or how this might be useful to research an aspect of
your topic.
Solution: Google Trends is useful to research a topic because it helps to compare the topic
with other topics. It helps to compare topics and thus helps to make correlations among them.
The searched topics were Swinburne and Starbucks. The research of these two topics shows the
geographical view and time chart to analyze. The geographical view and time chart helps to
know in which regions the topic is popular and at which time the topic was most searched.
Google Trends might be useful for people as it shows them a concise chart of the popularity of
the given topic at particular time. The geographical view helps people to understand, in which
region the given topic is populated at which time. The people across the world want a concise
result in a chart form to analyze their product. Google Trends help to analyze the given topic in a
graph form to help people to know when and where the topic was searched.
(b) What would be the limitations?
Solution: The limitations of Google Trends are that it does not provide transparency in the
result obtained. The details of results are not provided clearly. The time chart and geographical
view are not accurate. It does not give exact time and place of the researched topic. Sometimes
Google Trends get confuse with the term due to more than one meaning of same term. The result
of Google Trends is sometimes irrelevant because Google Trends confuse with other terms.

3LAB WORKSHEET 2
Google Trends is not appropriate to analyze the clear details of any topic. The analysis of
comparison does not show the data accurately.
3. Twitter Search
(a) Are there any ethical issues with using any of the above data sources? (No more than three
sentences).
Solution: The ethical issues related to Google trends are given as follows in terms of
objectivity, accuracy, and privacy and misuse.
 The objectivity issue of data provided by Google Trends against a topic is that it
does not give results for long terms. The result for short terms is not shown.
 The accuracy issue of data provided by Google Trends is that it does not provide
accurate time and region where the topic is mostly searched.
 The privacy and misuse issue of data provided by Google Trends is that the time
and region can be shared with anyone.