How do data providers (FB, Acxiom, 4square, etc) license out their data to enterprise with ideas around pricing?

In my experience coaching hundreds of people, anytime you go against your gut (aka intuition) you will lose. Data is important to consider, but your gut often knows the path.

There are so many ways to do it... Do you need this data for yourself, or you are planning to make a product around it? From what I see you can use Twitter API and Facebook Graph API (Are you comfortable programming?) Most of the students are active on social media so you will find lots of data. Facebook graph API will give you a number of likes and comments to all the posts of you competitors. You can analyze all the posts of your competitors. Using Twitter API you can get all the twits that use certain hashtags or mentions. If you are not into coding, but still want to get social media information, you can take a look at tools like IBM Watson ANalytics ($30 for personal use), it natively connects to Twitter API, and you don't have to be a programmer at all. It is intuitive and easy to learn. Analytics Canvas connects to Facebook Graph API (it's free for 30 days of trial). Unfortunately, you would not be able to collect any personal information from social media at large scale (age, income, gender, etc.), because it violates all the laws about privacy on the Internet. You can use census data instead. Google Sheets are a very handy tool if you are planning to use this information for personal research. You can set up a spreadsheet and add some Java script to make it collect all information from competitor's blogs, and also sites like Reddit. Finally, you can try web scraping (it's not the best, but can speed up the process). A tool like OutWitHub will collect information from websites (such as website reviews) based on the structure you provide (select html tags). You can collect thousands of reviews in one day if you automate it (paid version). Very easy to use. Note: not all the websites are open to this method, review their policies to make sure you are not violating their terms of service. Reviews belong to the website where they were published. If you REALLY need personal data (like how much they earn and how much they spend, etc.), just print out 100 questionnaires and go to Student Union Building of Dalhousie University. Most of the students will share any personal data in exchange for a Tim Horton's gift card that gets them a free coffee. It is probably the least technical and fastest way to get all the data you need. Hope this helps.

As someone who has built TAM models for various industries - I can attest this isn;t always easy. Many analyst firms (former analyst here) typically do some surveys and research among public company revenue reports for the year and then do some pixie dust extrapolating. The hard thing about a market where startups like Datameer play is that it is a) a nascent market and b) not a "zero sum" game. This makes it difficult to a) fully understand WHICH companies actually are in the market for this flavor of BI and b) know how the space is developing in terms of white space AND disrupting the entrenched BI giants. You might want to look at the press published versions (read: free) of analyst market share reports, and extrapolate from their. Also, back-channel gossip may give you some revenue numbers on these players - and if you assume pipeline is 3-4x revenue, build a model from there. Hope this helps.

I am currently working on a similar project to the auto tagging software for a client that would like similar functionality on Facebook. I think this is very useful especially with the two requests I have received from two different clients about developing this. Tagging is important, because it makes a website or social network pop more. With auto-tagging, anyone in a photo can be identified and it makes any website more user-friendly if you think about it. Bruce

I would disagree with the premise that "big data" isn't being converted into valuable information. Modern advertising is being driven by exactly this ability. The problem lies not with the information, or lack thereof, but with the decision makers. Lack of vision at both the strategic and tactical levels of decision, fear of change, among other things are at the root of the problem.