•Stefan Groschupf, the co-founder and CTO of Datameer, will discuss challenges in social media analytics and how to overcome these using big data analytics built on Hadoop, in his “Social Media: What’s Really the Buzz?” talk. Identifying true thought leads and influencers in social media conversations are becoming increasingly important, so that companies can better understand who is having an impact on their customers' buying decisions. Rather than counting mentions in limited subsets of social media data, organizations need a solution that can uncover complex relationships buried in massive volumes of social media data and a way to bring in data from multiple online data sources to determine the quality and effectiveness of user commentary.