A tool for social media analytics
This semester I took a retail management class that involved us working with a company that developed a service for analyzing real time conversations within social media. This tool is called Sysomos, which was actually developed at the University of Toronto, in the mid 2000s, by a PhD student and professor and is now “a six-product company, one-of-a-kind ad-hoc social media search engine, with over 1,400 customers across the globe.” They are partners with Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook, WeChat, Weibo, Pinterest and a few others. Here is a general overview of what they do with these platforms:
Their actual products include, Sysomos Map, Heartbeat, Expion, Analytics, Scout and Gaze.
- Sysomos Map — “Real time social research”; results of data are in depth (can search backwards of 2 years), comprehensive research (includes traditional media, blogs), benchmarking (compare yourself to other companies) sentiment, trend and influencer tracking.
- Sysomos Heartbeat — “Proactive social monitoring”; stay informed with alerts, customize dashboards and searches for particular projects, easy reporting, crisis monitoring, data integration with your sales, customer service etc. in conjunction with Google Analytics
- Sysomos Expion — “Social media marketing”; content planning (draft, approve, schedule and publish content or paid ads), respond to customers, rank content, customize workflows
- Sysomos Analytics — “Paid and owned analytics”; campaign metrics (spending, CPA, engagements, reach etc.), optimize across markets, segment and target audience
- Sysomos Scout — “Facebook analytics tool”; market research, competitive intelligence (share of voice, monitor competitors), audience insights, paid campaign strategy, measurement
- Sysomos Gaze — “Visual marketing analytics”; discover and analyze visual content (user generated and paid), automatic alerts, engage influencers, Gaze API
So, companies use this service in order to gain more insight on the conversations happening on social media around their brand. The competitive advantage Sysomos brings helps companies develop superior products or services that they are marketing, whether this be analyzing a specific campaign or discovering the demographics of your audience etc.
In class, we only had access to Sysomos MAP and Heartbeat where we had to complete a group assignment analyzing Harry Rosen’s social media efforts and present them our findings and recommendations. Learning to use these tools was fairly easy, they are both very similar; Heartbeat is almost like a new version of the MAP service, but apparently, MAP generates better sentiment results which is a function that deciphers key words and measures them on whether they are positive towards your brand or not.
The overall user experience of the website is very easy to navigate, the only difficulty of using this service is getting the hang of generating Boolean strings in order to search your brand/objective. Boolean search strings are simply the keywords, accounts, phrases you want to find but with operators such as AND, OR, AND NOT, that filter out the ‘noise’ that you don’t want to be included in your results. Learn how to create Boolean searches by watching the video below, since Boolean operators work in many other search engines, like Google for example.
The search string for Harry Rosen we generated was: (“@harryroseninc” OR “harryrosen.com” OR “HarryRosenJobs” OR “#harryrosen” OR “#harryrosenmenswear” OR “Harry Rosen”) AND (“menswear” OR “luxury” OR “Harry Magazine”) AND NOT (“Holland Rosen” OR “Harry Styles” OR “Harry Potter” OR Harry OR Rosen), looking for the last 6 months, but only a very few results were generated (I believe it was under 100 mentions or less). This can be interpreted in a bad or positive way — either the Boolean search is so well thought it filtered out all the unnecessary noise or there isn’t enough data available to generate sufficient numbers. Unfortunately, the last scenario was the issue with Harry Rosen’s social media activity, but this then just supported the fact that their social media marketing efforts needed to be revamped. My group decided to analyze who was talking about Harry Rosen online, measure their competitors and utilize Instagram as their recommendation tool to focus on.
While researching, we came across an issue with the tool that is counterproductive — the sentiment algorithm doesn’t always know when a mention is necessarily positive. For example, saying “This suit is sick” would be categorized as negative sentiment since “sick” is not usually a positive word. Another pain of Sysomos was that not all buttons/links worked when using Google Chrome to access the service, I didn’t learn this until many hours later after being frustrated Sysomos wasn’t working properly. Once that was fixed I was able to utilize the really handy feature, the compare function. In order to compare Harry Rosen to Holt Renfrew Men’s and Nordstrom, we had to create individual Boolean strings for each competitor in order to get searches that were focused on the same objectives and could be comparable.
This is very valuable data since you can compare not only the competitor’s mentions, but sentiment and demographics as well. The last area we needed to analyze was Instagram, which ended up being the most inconvenient social media platform to measure since the search function for Instagram only allows one word queries, therefore overlooking emojis, pictures, hashtags and phrases. This was not ideal for our project but perhaps Sysomos Gaze would be a better product to use from Sysomos’ services.
All in all, Sysomos is definitely a handy tool that allows one to gain direct access to real time mentions and fast metrics. Companies like Subway, Calvin Klein, Fisher Price and NBC are even using it in their everyday marketing strategies, for social media is future — I’m even handing in my assignments through Twitter nowadays!
