Social media and Data
researchers at Parature (a Microsoft company) asked 1,000 consumers whether they ever asked a customer service question via social media. Thirty-five percent responded that they had. Of these respondents, 51% reported that the brand’s response gave them a “somewhat more” or “much more” favorable view of the brand.
Social media has opened up a whole new way for brands and big businesses to engage with their customers in a more targeted, personal way. Big brands are expected to have a large social media presence and engage with their customers on a daily basis. Therefore brand image, and how brands project themselves on social media, is very serious business.
In April 2015, Airtel, One of India’s leading telecom provider came under fire because of a new product they had launched amid net neutrality concerns. This lead to a lot of users posting negative reviews of the brand on all their brand channels, as well as personal posts and tweets. The damage took a long while and considerable effort to be undone, but served as a reminder of how much disruption a negative social media image can cause.
When I was working at Germin8, a social media analytics company based in Mumbai, India, we were approached by Airtel with a rather interesting problem. They wanted a way they could track the entirety of their brand presence on social media, and be able to predict and react to events in real time. The challenge was, The brand this big, generates so much data every second, It was a challenge to figure out what data we would need to show, and how to display that data without overwhelming the user. The data also needed to e monitored by a dedicated team, who will then relay the information to the required channels. This meant that the Data needed to be displayed in a manner that is intuitive and yet does not fatigue the user by overwhelming his senses.
The solution was to be a video wall comprised of 12, 50" Television screens, and after several iterations, we came up with the way we would want the information to flow. It needed to be read from left to right, with the user getting a higher level view of the brand on the left, and delve deeper into specifics as he continues reading to the right.
The data was to be contained inside widgets. Each widget would provide insight on a particular metric, and could be interacted with in order to dive deeper into the data. This also allowed the entire setup to be dynamic, in that widgets could be created, destroyed, moved or altered depending on the need. Say for instance, during a campaign, a particular hashtag could be monitored and have that data displayed prominently, and can be reverted back to business as usual once the campaign ends.
The information pipeline
The information was designed such that with each widget, you would answer one question. As you delve deeper into all the answers, you start forming a picture in your head about your brand as an entity, on social media.
Mentions:
How much chatter is my brand generating?
Any post that references your brand, either directly or indirectly, on social media counts as a mention.
Sentiment:
Is that chatter good news or bad?
This metric defines the tonality context of all the mentions. If a mention has negative tonality, you get a lower score. And that’s bad.. because someone’s pissed!
Share of voice:
How visible is my brand, compared to my competitors?
Advertisements, Posts, all aimed at actively trying to target potential new customers, or engage existing customers.
Speaking of engaging users…
Engagement:
Am I doing it right?
Engagement is the interaction between people and brands on social networks. For example, on Facebook, engagement includes likes, comments and shares.
Engagement is particularly important because it takes time and trust for a user to care about the content the brand puts out. It also requires that the content be of great value to create an enriching positive experience which the user shall attribute to the brand itself.
Live Stream:
Can you show me what they’re saying?
The top mentions that matter more than the others, displayed as a constantly updating list.
Top Authors:
Of all the people talking about me, which ones matter the most?
A social media “Influencer” is someone who has a large audience for himself.
the content that these guys put out is read by a large volume of people, and therefore, are able to influence these people.
Turn around time:
How quickly am i responding to my customers?
Response rate:
How many posts am i responding to?
Map:
Where is all that chatter coming from?
Buzzcloud:
What keywords are being associated with my brand?
Trends:
What hashtags are trending which are related to my brand?
Working with so much data was incredibly intimidating, but it was also an experience unlike any other. Data is incredibly powerful if interpreted correctly, which also means it is up to the designers to make sure the data bring displayed be relevant, insightful and meaningful in order to enable the end user to make the right choices.
