Running PROCs on Your Facebook Friends (2011 version)

While talking to fellow SAS users at SAS Global Forum 2011 this week, I'll be discussing how SAS programmers can "play" with social media data that they can access on Facebook and Twitter. I always refer people to my blog for more information, and so I've prepared this blog post to make the information easy to find.

If you heard me talk about this topic at the conference and you're visiting the blog to learn more, Welcome! Here are the links to the additional materials that I've prepared.

Social Networking and SAS: Running PROCs on Your Facebook Friends (the paper):
Written with the help of Susan Slaughter, this paper describes how you can access different types of social media data, and provides some ideas for the analysis that you can perform with it.

Example Facebook application for gathering data (Windows application):
This application can be run standalone or as a custom task within SAS Enterprise Guide. You can use it to connect to your Facebook account, gather your friend data (names, education history, relationship status, birthdays, and more), and then save all of the information as a SAS program. You can then run the program in SAS (or via SAS Enterprise Guide).

The application generates some simple reports, but I'm confident that the creative SAS user community will be able to come up with even better results than I did.

Example SAS program to gather/analyze Twitter content (SAS program):
This program uses the XML LIBNAME engine, FILENAME URL, SGPLOT procedure, and a simple PROC PRINT to create a report of recent Twitter activity around a specified hashtag.

All of this information is also linked from this page on sasCommunity.org.

I owe a big Thank You to Pete Lund, the section chair for the Social Media section at the conference, for inviting us to present on this topic. And also thanks to Susan Slaughter, who helped me to shape and validate the content for this paper and presentation.