> I actually can't name a single person who uses social media in a highly productive way.
I'm talking about mining, say, Twitter's firehose for nuggets of gold using, let's say, R[1] or finding other clever ways to separate the signal from the noise.
It's well known that Twitter and even Facebook's firehose are a cluttered, un-curated mess which are crying out to be analyzed with things like R[1], if you are so inclined, or finding other ways to do signal analysis on other social networks like Facebook.