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Simplify360 eBook: Predictive Analytics The Future of Social Media Table of Contents
PREFACE WHAT ARE PREDICTIVE ANALYTICS? ADITYA CHOWDHARY - CLIENT SERVICES DIRECTOR MARKETELLIGENT BEYOND SENTIMENTS ZISHAN ANSARI - SENIOR BUSINESS ANALYST, TARGET CORPORATION SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGIES FOR THE DATA DRIVEN NEWSROOM DENNIS MORTENSEN CEO, VISUAL REVENUE TOO MUCH TALK IN ANALYTICS & TOO LITTLE ACTION! AJAY KELKAR COO, HANSA CEQUITY ACTIONABLE ANALYTICS JAMES TAYLOR CEO, DECISION MANAGEMENT SOLUTIONS UNDERSTANDING AND MEASURING SOCIAL INFLUENCE 3 5 5 9 9 16 16 23 23 27 27 32
ARUN SUNDARARAJAN - PROFESSOR AND NEC FACULTY FELLOW, NEW YORK UNIVERSITYS STERN SCHOOL OF BUSINESS 32 HOW SOCIAL MEDIA CAN REVEAL THE MYSTERY OF BRAND LOYALTY! G.K SURESH - GENERAL MANAGER, ITC FOODS SCRM IN 2013: NEXT GEN SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS BHUPENDRA KHANAL CEO, SIMPLIFY360 SOCIAL MEDIA BEST PRACTICES ANKITA GABA - CO-FOUNDER, SOCIAL SAMOSA INSIDE BIG DATA WHATS IN IT FOR MARKETING? DEEP SHERCHAN CMO, SIMPLIFY360 SOCIAL MEDIA PREDICTIONS FOR 2013 PRASHANT JAIN - SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYST, SIMPLIFY360 36 36 42 42 51 51 56 56 61 61
Preface
Today enterprises are overwhelmed with the possibility of social media. Its been proven that it is no longer a fad and it means serious business. At this turning event of realization, enterprises are not equipped with right tools and human resources to leverage social media. On the other hand, we are seeing a rapid innovation in the field of social media tools and technologies social monitoring, analytics, marketing, intelligence, scrm, big data etc. As a result, we at Simplify360 tried to connect with different professionals active in this field of social analytics and learn from them about the future of social media. In this process we kept hearing predictive analytics as a repeating term. Hence we asked our team to reach out to the experts in the field and learn about what does predictive analytics mean in social media and its role in the future of social media. We would like to thank all the people who have agreed to share their experience and knowledge about social media.
Predictive models commonly include a number of variables, such as number of late payments, and weighing factors that reflect the importance of that variable in predicting future behavior. These are commonly regression-type models. Modern predictive analytics use similar kind of data to build models to classify people into different groups or predict their behavior . For instance, we might build a model that
Source: griibdesign.co.uk
An example is the TRA (Theory of Reasoned Action). This model states that buying behavior is impacted by a consumers attitude and beliefs about the products, as well as the norms related to that purchase. This theory, ofcourse, 6
In case of social commerce, any kind of buzz is a good buzz because it directly translates into customer demand. For example, keeping tap of all the trending topics on Twitter can be a useful exercise to predict future demands. This allows business to leverage social media and maximize sales. Though the concept is still in its infancy, 2013 is an exciting time where we could see some of these concepts being implemented.
Beyond Sentiments
Zishan Ansari
Zishan is a SAS certified predictive modeler with over 4 years' analytics consulting experience for global players in banking, insurance and retail domain. Zishan is currently part of Target Corporation's enterprise business intelligence team based in India that provides analytic solutions to problems in operational risk, loss prevention and profit protection area.
Beyond Sentiments
Zishan Ansari - Senior Business Analyst, Target Corporation
Source - http://provalisresearch.com/uploads/Sentiment.jpg
If you are reading this, you probably are aware of how things in the social media world usually work. You probably have used/seen/heard of tools that tells you about the sentiment of your customers, by analyzing what they are writing over various social media platforms. And I am sure many of you would have also seen software providers making tall claims about how accurate their engines are in predicting the correct sentiment of a companys customer base. There is no question about whether sentiment analysis is a powerful analysis technique or not, because it certainly is. The bigger question is whether it is the right thing for you or not? And if it is, then do you have the ability to apply it correctly or not? If you are looking for an answer to the question whether investment on sentiment analysis is the right thing for your business, then read further. In case you have already spent loads of cash on buying a sentiment analysis package, still read further to know how you can best utilize it.
Why sentiments? Being a part of a smart and proactive organization that listens to all its customers, you would want to build a strategy where you: Listen to all that your customers are saying about your brand or a newly Take actions based on customer sentiments Redress customer grievances by offering him or her some brownie points And in turn be loved by your customers for being a great listener launched product
Well, this all works really well when you are running a Mom and Pop Store.
How are things different in social media? Simple answer to this would be in more ways than one. It is important for you to understand these differences to figure out whether you need sentiment analysis or not. . Not every person is good in expressing themselves in text, and definitely not in just hundred and forty characters. And this poses a big challenge. Why? Because, there is no way to capture customers facial expression through social media, nor is there a way to capture voice modulation to figure out customers mood.
With deliberately excluding the discussion about misclassifications that majority of the tools anyways do, there is one more aspect of language that I think should be considered, and that is dialects. In this very world of ours, where spoken languages change with every two hundred to three hundred kilometers, it will only be illogical for us to expect everyone to express their sentiments in the language in which our softwares NLP engine is trained.
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OK. So in that case will it be insane for us to demand for an NLP engine that has the functionality of identifying the sentiments from any language/dialect. No, it wouldnt be completely insane. But it is very likely that you will be paying a bomb to get such a service. Let us assume that you get an NLP engine that has all these powers. Tell me who writes a perfect language these days? If you think your customer does, then you are absolutely wrong. Even Shakespeare would have had a hard time in expressing himself in hundred and forty characters forget about an average Joe (Pardon me if you are Shakespeare or Joe!). We are living in an era where even native speakers are getting bad in grammar day by day. Languages are evolving, and so are the NLP engines. And, more evolved an engine is, more dollars you have to burn for it. Knowing your objective You will be solving the major part of the puzzle if you figured out what your objective is behind sentiment analysis. Because, after this you just have to pick the right approach to achieve your goal. If you are managing a customer service center and you receive 100,000 e-mails every day, and would like them to be classified as Positive, Neutral or Negative then you can use software that has the capability to do the job. Thats all the functionality you need to achieve your goal. Rest of the work will be done by the executives to ensure each customer is satisfied. Looking beyond sentiments Say if you had kids. You find out on a Sunday morning that your kids were annoyed about something and were not looking happy. Being a good parent you give them permission to go out with friends. If you are a more involved parent, you would yourself go out with your kids, to make their day. A parent very well knows what to do to change the mood of their kids.
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As a kid I have really enjoyed that. Sometimes getting annoyed for no good reason can also get you treats, just because your parents wants you to be happy always. But if you were a responsible parent, what else would you do? You would probably try to understand, why were your kids upset at the first place? Have they been getting annoyed quite often recently? What are the circumstances which makes them unhappy? A responsible company is no different from a responsible parent in this aspect. It will do a root cause analysis of what actions led to all this. And they can take actions to ensure that such circumstances do not arise in future. An organization with a dedicated customer service team can probably do all what a responsible parent do, given that they know who the customer is. It can spend resources to get in touch with the customer, understand his/her concerns, identify the causes of unhappiness and then act accordingly. It can also go ahead and analyze what were the things that led to such circumstances. So what should you do? Should you wait for a cheaper NLP engine with all the functionality? Or should you wait until your company buys a foolproof textanalytics software license? It is important to be clear about what exactly is your objective to perform sentiment analysis. You can then combine the results from a not so very expensive tool with other free tools or with your own data visualization tools for analysis. Stream Graphs One such freely available tool is stream graph. It helps you in analyzing what people have been tweeting about a brand/product over a period of time.
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The Stream Graph shows the usage over time for the words, which are highly associated with the search word. One of these series together with a time period is in a selected state and colored red. The tweets that contain this word in the given time period are shown below the graph. You can click on another word series or time period to see different matches. In the match list you can click on any word to create a different graph with tweets containing that word. You can also click on the user or comment icons and any URL to see the appropriate content in another window. If you see a large spike in one time period that hides the detail in all the other periods it will be useful to click in the area to the left of the y-axis in order to change the vertical scale. The bad part is that the free version analyzes latest thousand tweets. The good part is that there are open source resources (http://www.processing.org/) available to help you develop such graphs. Probably you need to invest some time to develop that. Remember, there are no free lunches and there are no free graphs either. You can combine the results of the sentiment analysis with the results of stream graph analysis to infer what circumstances probably led to positive or negative sentiments. So even if your sentiment analysis says that 80% of your customers have neutral opinion and your sales figures are way below your forecasted sales, 13
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As a process, editors and their social media tools should essentially follow a process of (1) finding and selecting the proper content; (2) pushing that content into the social channels; (3) measuring success and/or failure, and (4) learning and optimizing from it. When editors begin to answer these questions and follow this process, they make the definition of their success in social media more precise, and they move away from the vanity metrics of the consumer marketplace. It is one of the things that separate the genuine publishers from the everybodys a publisher publishers. Determining Success and Failure in Real Time The real-time nature of social media interaction makes it a natural complement to the newsroom. It is, however, that same fleeting aspect that makes real-time success measurements akin to capturing lightning in a bottle for them. It can only be done with some of todays more sophisticated tools.
With the proper tools in hand, news organizations can have more exact measurements on social media. For example, they can have a means to determine the difference between tweeting content at 4:23 p.m. and 4:35 p.m., followed by recommended actions based on real-time performance and
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For the editor and the newsroom, this makes their social media activity only worth the time that they invest in measuring it -- not for the vanity metrics, but for the deeper ones. This is where their ability to know true success from simple failure will show whether their time spent sharing (to grow their audience) has been well spent.
Whereas these decisions were once made based on intuition, skill and instinct, there now exists a huge pool of data that, when properly applied, can enhance an editors judgment with suggestions and the additional confidence to take decisive action. The genuine value of such predictive algorithms is in the ability to recommend specific actions for an editor within an editorial framework outlined by the organization. Separately, these two elements are important; together, they provide a powerful engine for editors to act immediately, secure in both their judgment and the interest of their publication. These new tools simplify data and tell a newsroom when it should tweet and also what it should be tweeting. The computerized suggestions take on the role of a
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This is what software architect Grady Booch had in mind when he uttered that famous phrase: "A fool with a tool is still a fool."
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Maybe there are some learnings here: 1. Analytics doesnt need you to solve a technical problem but a business & social problem. And most Business analysts have not spent much time in business roles. They are super specialised number crunchers without a sufficient exposure to business reality. Even if the managers have some exposure to business through experience across a variety of analytics projects, is it
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Actionable Analytics
James Taylor
James is the CEO and a Principal Consultant of Decision Management Solutions. He is the leading expert in how to use business rules and analytic technology to build Decision Management Systems. James is passionate about using Decision Management Systems to help companies improve decision making and develop an agile, analytic and adaptive business.
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Actionable Analytics
James Taylor CEO, Decision Management Solutions
The use of analytics, especially predictive analytics, to improve business results is a key focus for marketing departments around the world. The potential for new sources of big data, such as social media, to improve analytics results is getting attention too. To add value, though, any analytics must be actionable and acted on. Experience suggests that making analytics actionable is harder than it looks, with far too many analytic models sitting unused or failing to have a significant business impact. Part of the reason that organizations struggle with making analytics actionable is that they have a mistaken belief that using analytics will tell them how to change their business. They believe they can do some analytics and get a great aha moment that will tell them to start doing something differently or stop doing something else. They believe that analytics will give them huge, one-time improvements in their business. But they are wrong. Analytics will not tell you how to change your business. Instead you must change your business so that analytics can help you run it more effectively. You must change your business, change the way you interact with prospects and customers, so that your analytics can be actionable.
To make analytics actionable many organizations are turning to Decision Management. Decision Management is an approach to analytics that focuses on decisions first identifying, modeling and managing critical business decisions and applying analytics to improve those decisions. Decision Management does not begin by asking what can we measure or even what does this data tell us. Decision Management begins by asking which decisions matter to our business? Which decisions, if made
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These decisions are often not the first ones that come to mind, however. Instead of focusing on big strategic decisions or on management decisions, Decision Management focuses on decisions about individual customers or prospects. These micro decisions are often hidden in an organization - hidden because although organizations realize they make a decision about their customers, they do not realize how many they make. For instance, if you decide to send a marketing email to a subset of your customers you might think you have made just a couple of decisions such as what to put in the email and who receives it. And you might think that you could 28
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See, for example, Aral, Muchnik and Sundararajan, PNAS 2009, http://www.pnas.org/content/106/51/21544
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A link to this ad, tweeted from @Oreo (which had, at the time, a mere 65,000 followers) generated 16,000 re-tweets and 6,000 favorites, (more than triple what President Obamas most successful tweet generated after the State of the Union speech), making this perhaps the most successful advert of the Superbowl. Often, in our quest for influencers, we forget that good content can create its own viral spread. Some companies like Buzzfeed are building a business on this idea. Extreme humor like theirs isnt always necessary whats critical to remember is that even in our brave new world of social marketing, the message is still at least as important as the maven.
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One brand that has successfully utilized the above steps is Bingo! with the launch of Bingo! Tangles on Facebook. With over 3 million fans, Facebook offered Bingo! a great window into understanding consumers conversations. Consumers use these forums to talk about their likes & dislikes and welcome new information
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Facebook as a launch platform for various other brands. Data is a vital raw material for building the business infrastructure in the information age. Brands that can put systems in place to access, process and utilize the data will be the most successful in connecting with the customers and influence their decisions. The key idea behind customer loyalty is customer retention. There are already different programs, which businesses employ like reward programs, referral programs and 1-to-1 marketing campaigns to ensure that customers stay with the brand. But social networks are taking over these programs in terms of gaining a deeper relationship with the brand. There are 3 ways to use social media data to improve and make social programs 37
Worlds First 360 Social Marketing Suit www.simplify360.com
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1. First of all, what are customers talking about your brand and how? What are their attitudes and sentiments towards your brand? What is their feeling towards your brand? Are they neutral, friendly, hostile or ignorant? This helps brand not only understand the emotion but also map them along the brand attributes and identify the missing bits. 2. Secondly, to understand the emotional connection between a customer and your brand and measuring the strength of the bond. Most often an out-burst by a customer is temporary, and can be mitigated easily. Hence, identifying such customers is vital. Many a times the reverse is true as well. There was once a complaint on Facebook by a consumer on the quality of Atta. Before we could begin to address the problem, 3 other consumers had responded asking the fan to check the storage conditions at the outlet of purchase as well as her kitchen.
3. Thirdly understand that the customer is likely to buy more than one segment
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We should start looking at the business functions and use Social Media to achieve the business goals. The KPIs needs to be defined and best practices built up. And to make all these things happen, Analytics has a major role to play. Here are some of my recommendations. 1. Social Media is more than Engagement. Social means business. Enough and more has already been said about Social Media Engagement. Let us outgrow it. Let us talk about the real business impact. Obviously, the same business metrics work for Social Media that work for other mediums. The value has to be in one or more of the following: a. Increased Revenue
There are multiple avenues of revenue realization through Social Media. Companies are trying offering discount coupons and cross-selling products in 42
Social Media does not only have consumers. It has resonators too. And this can be highly leveraged by properly building a community and keeping them active. The message once gone viral is more powerful than several passively played ads in other channels. Reason the message flows in the form of recommendations between friends and connected individuals. The trust factor is thus high enough to show some amazing output. c. Cost Savings
Take the example of a BPO operation. The average cost per call from a BPO company to the consumer costs an average of USD $0.1 (INR 5), while the cost of receiving a call on time from a customer is USD $1 (INR 50). The difference in the price occurs as the BPO Company needs to charge for resources waiting for the call too. This adds to the phone bill charge.
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others phone number or email id. Bonus huge savings on manpower cost. Add to it the removal of phone bills. Simple internet connection will suffice. This results in huge savings overall. 2. Integration is the way to go. Social CRM is the future.
You might have a million fans on Facebook and you probably have a few million customers. And a million times, you have asked your Social Media Agency how many of those fans are your customers and how many sign-ups you received through the medium. You have been a badass towards your agency. Here is the bad news your agency does not have the answer. But there is good news too you can have those answers. The answer surfaces when you start looking at it closely and ask your IT guys to work closely with the CMOs office and to do proper CRM Integration. You may choose to outsource it too. And I feel, this is a better solution as when two C Level officers get involved, the work hardly gets done on time. Let the CMO 44
Worlds First 360 Social Marketing Suit www.simplify360.com
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The KPIs here need to be: i. No. of leads Youtube, Facebook, Twitter need landing pages and links to track the number of leads that get realized. Slideshare provides a way to capture leads through form submission. It is important to realise that such social media leads are mostly the leads that show interest in your product and not necessarily an interest in buying the product. This does not hold true and there can be a direct buying interest in leads if a coupon is downloaded through a Facebook App, for example.
ii. Quality of leads It is important to track the quality of leads in terms of further communication that goes with the generated lead. The conversion rate is the best metric to judge. Do not get carried away with the noise about Social Media and look for other metrics. Simple business metrics work great here. iii. Volume of business generated Together with conversions, keep a tab on your volume of business. This is 46
Worlds First 360 Social Marketing Suit www.simplify360.com
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The time has gone when you would visit a Market Research agency, ask them to do a survey, collect the results in a month or two, analyse the data and get the report in 3 to 4 months. The pace at which innovation happens now and markets shift, the traditional market research reports will be as good as useless. Current business scenarios call for a real time intelligence monitoring system, and no medium can deliver it better than Social Channels. The Social Media stream is real-time and there are enough systems like Simplify360,that provide intelligence on brands, competitors and markets in real time. Waiting for reports is a part of history now. Welcome to the intelligence revolution. 6. Social Media is no more CMOs problem. It is the CEOs problem.
You are making a Big mistake if you consider Social Media as just a part of Digital Media Marketing. It is not. Social Media is a part of Digital Media, but it is not limited to Marketing Functions. It is more like Email and Phone. It is a resource that the whole company needs to play with and take benefit from. Social Media is thus, a CEOs problem. It is a brand reputation problem, it is a social media marketing problem, it is a customer service problem, it is a human resources problem, and it is an investor relations problem. At Nestle, the Communications Vice President is responsible for Social Media efforts throughout the company. For ITC Foods, it is the marketing head and individual brand heads who take the call. For Coffee Day, CMO Ramki himself gets involved. And for Mahindra Group, Group Chairman Anand Mahindra himself leads the Social Army. The way companies use Social media varies greatly, and this, I feel, is the outcome of a lack of defined best practices in the Social Media industry.
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The sales team will also have to jump in, to nurture leads that come in from social media. The product innovation team will get the necessary feedback from the consumer conversations for free, where they tune in to listen that is, which will help them redesign the products or services to increase performance. The 51
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These questions need definite answers, which can only be produced through analysis of customer data. And we are lucky that we have the technology and data to work on. Today, there are a variety of customer touch points that are generating data every second likes, shares, comments, tweets, updates, videos, voice, mouse clicks, location, meta tags, customer transactions etc. All this unstructured data calls for an extensive analysis and integration with structured data available
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2. Optimizing the communication message. In todays fast paced communication highways, messages travel at the speed of light, reaching millions. As the message moves from one person to another, it creates a lot of feedback that can be gathered in real-time. Analysis of such feedback gives marketers a clearer look into the performance of the message and the kind of optimization it might need. This can enable marketers carry out A/B testing on messages and increase their impact. 3. Real-time Recommendation Generation The retail sector is one area which can benefit hugely from big data analytics, because compared to any other industry, it creates huge data from different offline and online transactions.
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Big data can allow e-commerce sites to crunch a huge amount of data in seconds and provide recommendations to the visitors on the kind of products they might be interested to buy. This kind of real-time analytics implementation can hugely increase the sales count. Google, Amazon and now even Facebook, have been experimenting with such methods to make effective Ads and product placements. 4. New product Strategies Starting from mobile devices to clothes to shoes, you can buy anything online. As a result, there are numerous dedicated blogs and communities that discuss specific products. This provides huge opportunities for marketers to analyze the conversation and produce strong correlations between the kinds of product people might want to buy. These kinds of feedback can be sent back to the product team to make any edits and changes. These adjustments can increase the effectiveness of the product by large margins. 5. Lead/Prospect Identification Currently many automated marketing tools are coming up with the implementation of big data analytics, which allows marketers to understand how people are interacting with their marketing campaigns and identify prospects. With information generated from engagement on Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and other platforms, such tools can effectively identify leads which are more likely to convert. 6. Improving customer experience CRM tools and contact centers are under huge challenges to resolve online customer complaints originating from hundreds of different platforms and portals. Besides responding to messages, analytics can be implemented to
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Will the world see an IPO from Twitter? When Facebook was going to announce its IPO last year, everyone was expecting that this will start a wave of IPOs by other Internet giants. But as the IPO was announced it tumbled from $38 to $20. This of course forced the web companies to put their plans on hold. But just imagine, what will happen if twitter announces its IPO? The business model of twitter is more reliable and robust as compared to that of Facebook as it doesnt rely on third parties. With twitter ad revenues reaching new heights since its launch, its predicted that twitter will sweep of nearly 13% of total social ad revenue of US. [See the graph] But, the top brass of twitter is denying any possibility of an IPO, but it looks like that by the end of 2013 the most active online community of the world will be all set to get listed. LinkedIn The Underdog Social Media Gurus across the globe agree to the statement that LinkedIn is the real social network. With new features like personal endorsements, news feed and a more classical new look of user profile; LinkedIn is all set to win hearts. [Must Read]
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Pinterest will try to tap the male demographic Pinterest in a very short time has experienced exponential growth and it has reported highest increase in unique users across PC, mobiles and apps. But, there is one thing which is worrisome for Pinterests growth plans and it is that the social platform hasnt been able to entice male users and it is being seen as the major challenge the virtual pin board provider faces. With more than 75% of Pinterest users being female, it will be definitely be a uphill task for the Pinterest team.
Possibilities of tying up with mens brands appear to be realistic in 2013 as it will encourage male demographic to start pinning. So, the world awaits a stunning launch from Pinterest and so do I. Go through this Social Media Report for 2012 by Nielsen for knowing about what happened in 2012 and predicting that who will be leading the social media army in 2013. Will Social Media fraternity see a revolutionary platform in 2013? With emphasis on customer service through digital platforms increasing like
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