Frequently Asked Questions

Wisdom

1. What is MicroStrategy Wisdom?

MicroStrategy Wisdom is an analytic application that builds on, extends, and enriches the Facebook data provided by MicroStrategy Gateway. MicroStrategy Wisdom lets companies explore the wealth of information that Facebook contains about people who use their Facebook applications, delivering insightful knowledge about them by analyzing their demographic and psychographic profiles. With Wisdom, companies can segment their Facebook user populations, helping them deliver more personalized content and offers through their Facebook applications.

2. What are the benefits of MicroStrategy Wisdom?

MicroStrategy Wisdom provides data enrichment in the form of backfilling data gaps, estimating new data, scores and ratings, and refined page classification. Further, MicroStrategy Wisdom delivers pre-packaged analytics that are easy to use and understand. These features allow companies to analyze and segment demographic and psychographic profiles of their Facebook application users.

3. Who can use MicroStrategy Wisdom?

Any company, organization, or brand with a Facebook application that collects user tokens can use MicroStrategy Wisdom. The range of data analyzed by MicroStrategy Wisdom is determined based on the depth of permissions "tokens" given by the individuals to the Facebook application.

4. I have a fan page on Facebook. Can I use MicroStrategy Wisdom to analyze my fans?

No, MicroStrategy Wisdom is for analysis of Facebook application users. A Facebook application that requests permission to access user data is required for MicroStrategy Wisdom.

5. What kinds of analytics are available in MicroStrategy Wisdom?

MicroStrategy Wisdom provides a set of pre-packaged dashboards that offer the ability to gain insights from the demographics, psychographics, and interests of the people who use your Facebook applications. You can search and filter your user population and analyze the resulting group based on various aspects such as age, gender, liked pages, psychographic groups, and more. You can also compare psychographic groups side by side and the profiles of app users who like distinct pages.

6. How does MicroStrategy Wisdom extract information from Facebook and where is it stored?

MicroStrategy Wisdom employs MicroStrategy Gateway, which uses the Facebook Graph API to connect to Facebook. MicroStrategy Gateway stores the data in a relational model of the Facebook social graph for the tokens provided by your Facebook application. MicroStrategy Wisdom Enterprise then transforms that model so it is optimized for analysis and stores it in a relational data warehouse in the MicroStrategy Cloud. This data warehouse is optimized for the deep analytics provided by MicroStrategy Wisdom.

7. What kinds of permission "tokens" are required by applications to get this information?

A permission token requires access to the following information to collect a meaningful set of data for analysis: (1) basic user information, including name and gender; (2) a subset of the user profile, including birthday, languages, likes, interests, and current city; (3) relationship status; and (4) anytime access to user data. Additional permission tokens are recommended to provide more information for analysis. These permission tokens include (1) a subset of the user profile, including access to a user's hometown, interests and activities, education and work history, political views, orientation, quotes, events, RSVPs, and groups; (2) check-ins; and (3) and posts in a user's newsfeed.

8. How is the information in MicroStrategy Wisdom kept up-to-date with Facebook?

MicroStrategy Wisdom updates the information about your application users at regular intervals using a batch process. This process ensures that MicroStrategy Wisdom hosts current information and accounts for any changes in user tokens.

9. How can I access MicroStrategy Wisdom?

MicroStrategy Wisdom is accessible through a Web browser or on an Apple iPad device. MicroStrategy Wisdom is a cloud-based service, making it accessible anywhere.

10. What is the relationship between MicroStrategy Wisdom and Wisdom Personal?

They are two separate offerings aimed at different audiences - MicroStrategy Wisdom helps organizations analyze their Facebook application users. Wisdom Personal, helps individual Facebook users analyze and get insights on their personal social network.

11. How do I get started with MicroStrategy Wisdom?

You can email us at info@microstrategy.com, call us 888.537.8135, or contact us at an office near you. If you're a MicroStrategy customer, please contact your account team.

Gateway

1. What is MicroStrategy Gateway?

MicroStrategy Gateway for Facebook is a cloud-based service that interconnects enterprise IT environments to Facebook, allowing enterprises to build better Facebook applications and to inject social intelligence into existing applications.

2. How does MicroStrategy Gateway work?

MicroStrategy Gateway converts Facebook information into a set of data structures that can be stored in a relational database system, making it inherently and instantly suitable for data-rich Facebook apps.

Every Facebook application requires explicit permissions from each user to access his or her Facebook data. After a user grants his or her permission to gather this data via your Facebook app, Facebook grants an Access Token to the app, enabling it to collect Facebook data via their Graph API. Rather than your company trying to learn Facebook's APIs and formatting that data into something usable, you can use MicroStrategy Gateway. MicroStrategy Gateway uses the permissions given to your company to extract data from the social graph database. It places that data into a relational data model and provides this structured data to your company. The data is refreshed on a scheduled, ongoing basis so you always have the most up-to-date consumer information.

3. What is a Facebook Access Token?

An Access Token represents a set of permissions to either read from Facebook or write back to Facebook. An Access Token needs to be granted by a Facebook user in the context of an application. Each Application-User combination will result in its own Facebook Access Token. The tokens themselves are long text strings.

An Access Token that allows reading from a user's profile typically restricts access to only a subset of all the information that Facebook maintains about that user. For an application to receive an Access Token, each user must "approve" the request for access, which lists the fields that the application desires to access. Some examples of the types of information that a token may allow access to include basic profile, educational history, birth date, professional profile, relationships, status, wall, and/or access to information about a user's friends.

While it is possible to request a complete token allowing for complete access to a user's profile, that is often not ideal, as there is an inverse relationship between the number of fields requested and the percentage of users that will approve the request. Therefore it is important to carefully select the permissions that are requested. Facebook's policies cover a wide variety of topics relation to the collection and use of Facebook user data. Please see such policies for additional guidance. Further details around permissions and Access Tokens can be found at the Facebook Developer site with a listing of all available read and write permissions.

4. What happens if some of the Access Tokens are not valid or have expired?

MicroStrategy Gateway will not extract any Facebook data for invalid Access Tokens.

5. Why might an Access Token become invalid?

Access Tokens are invalidated by Facebook if a user:

• Changes his or her Facebook password after the Access Token has been created
• Removes individual privileges from the application in the "Privacy Preferences" section within the Facebook portal
• Removes entire application in the "Privacy Preferences" section within the Facebook portal

6. What update schedules are available for newly extracted Facebook data?

Data updates are provided on a weekly basis.

7. In what format is the extracted Facebook data delivered?

The extracted data is delivered to you in a relational format in CSV (comma-separated value) files. These files can be loaded into any relational database system.

8. Does MicroStrategy Gateway work with Facebook fan pages?

MicroStrategy Gateway works with Facebook applications only. A Facebook app that requests permission to access user information via Access Tokens is required.

9. What exactly does Gateway need to extract data for my Facebook users?

MicroStrategy Gateway needs the following 3 input fields for each of your Facebook applications users:

• Application ID - the unique ID for your internal Facebook web or mobile application, assigned by Facebook
• Member IDs - Facebook user IDs, as recorded by your Facebook-enabled application
• Access Tokens - representing permissions to access the user's Facebook data, as provided by Facebook to your application for data access for each user

Your application must store the Member IDs and Access Tokens when users interact with your application, as they cannot be retrieved from Facebook except when a user is actually using your application. Some applications do not store Member IDs or Access Tokens, so you may need to adapt your app for use with MicroStrategy Gateway.

10. In what format does the input data need to be provided?

The input data can be provided in an Excel spreadsheet or in a CSV (comma-separated value) file. Here is an example of what this file should look like:

11. How is the relational data transferred from the MicroStrategy Cloud?

Data delivery is performed via encrypted Secure FTP (secure file transfer protocol). Every enterprise user of the MicroStrategy Gateway service has a dedicated Secure FTP account.

12. Can you provide DDL (data definition language) scripts that create the table schema for the relational database to hold the extracted data?

Yes, DDL scripts are available for the most popular database systems such as IBM DB2, IBM Netezza, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, ParAccel, PostgreSQL, Teradata, and others.

13. Are data loading scripts provided for loading the CSV files into the database?

Data loading scripts are not provided out-of-the-box by MicroStrategy. These scripts would be developed and operated by your Database administrator. MicroStrategy can provide professional services to develop data loading scripts if desired.

14. Is the data update provided as complete download or as incremental updates with only the changed data?

The data is provided as a complete download of all your Access Tokens.

15. How frequently does Gateway accept new Access Tokens?

New Access Tokens can be provided on a daily basis via a file upload through your Secure FTP account.