The social ecosystem has become the pulse of the world. With millions of users and billions of social activities passing through the ever-growing real-time social Web each day, it's no wonder that companies need to reevaluate their traditional business models to take advantage of this valuable data. But with the social Web growing daily at exponential levels, how do companies handle data of this magnitude? Join this session to discover how companies are harnessing "big" social data to change the way they operate. You'll learn about the infrastructure needed to collect, filter, and use big social data via a case study exploring the true volume of the Twitter Firehose. We'll also discuss hedge fund, emergency response, sentiment and semantic analysis, and brand analytics case studies that highlight how companies in these industries are collecting and applying big social data to to produce big results.