Capstone Partnership With The Brewers Association

I am happy to announce that over the last 2 or so months I have been working with The Brewers Association as a part of the Capstone course requirement through The University of Wisconsin Masters of Science in Data Science program.

The Brewers Association’s purpose is to promote and protect American craft brewers, their beers and the community of brewing enthusiasts. With this project I hope to help the group to work towards this purpose by providing more insight into their social media efforts.

Later this year I will dive in to more depth of the ins and outs of the project, but for now I will provide a high level overview.

This project focuses specifically on Twitter data, although all that will be done should be transferable to any social media platform assuming that there is access to their data. Twitter was identified specifically because of the high quality API exposed to the general public, and the plethora of developer libraries in various programing languages.

So why is The Brewer’s Association (BA) interested in this? Well, it all stems from recent changes announced from various social media platforms as a response to the possibility of their platforms spreading fake news. BA has realized that these changes could have an effect on their social media campaigns in the coming future, and it would be beneficial to understand what their followers are interested in and what causes them to share BA posts.

Overall there are 4 primary objectives for this project including the following:

1. Gather BA relevant and related data from the Twitter developer API
2. Use this data to analysis and create a dashboard/s answering the above specific questions identified by BA
3. Research and Implement an algorithm to identify individuals that are accredited with a high level of influence with BA related content.
4. The overall outcome of this project is to maintain or improve the effectiveness of BA’s social media campaigns regardless of the changes of any given social media platform.

Please check back later for updates and possibly even some deep dives on various parts of the project in the near future

Cheers!