Analyzing social media sentiments

What book should I read? What movie should we see? What’s the best restaurant in this neighborhood?

Not so long ago, answers to these questions were best found through the world’s largest, oldest social network, better known as “word of mouth.” Few forms of marketing are as potent. Yet, the breadth of advice from one’s friend and family is limited, and sometimes hard to access.

These days, with the rise of online social networks, consumers and business alike have a nearly limitless source of this kind of opinion, but face a growing challenge of finding out which opinions to trust.

Let me share from a chief marketing officer’s (CMO) perspective.

Navigating data

CMOs are striving to better understand today’s most effective marketing strategies. Their goal is to ultimately increase sales by growing average order values, conversion rates and cart sizes. As social media explodes, valuable trends are increasingly available to those able to discover them. Yet sorting out signal from noise is only getting harder. Fortunately, smarter technology is now available and is already helping businesses and cities do so.

Whether a simple “like” of a book on Facebook, a rant about a movie on Twitter, or a food photo review on Instagram, there’s a rising torrent of opinions available to help shape our understanding of what’s hot and what’s not.

Social media is mushrooming in size, spreading from its early roots with younger adults into mainstream consumers. Every minute, there are some 1.7 million Facebook posts, a third of a million tweets, plus some 2.8 million YouTube views, according to Edelman Digital’s 2013 Social Media Trends.

Digitally speaking, these are just the tip of the iceberg. The spread of these networks and the data they create is gaining speed as smart phones and other mobile devices increasingly become consumers’ dominant means of engagement.

Without tools to help navigate this deluge of data, any potentially valuable insight is just noise.

The issue is not limited to consumers. Companies, nonprofits and even cities are also reckoning with social media overload, trying to harvest valuable insights from the whirlwind of opinions, tweets and posts.

There is a better way. While individuals are easily overwhelmed by this swirl, computers excel at the task, tirelessly sorting through huge pools of information, whether it’s financial data or, as it turns out, tweets.

Analytics

In recent years, sophisticated analytics and natural language processing have matured to the point where computers can make sense of even the sometimes-cryptic shorthand of twitter posts.

Scanning millions of these short messages can help gauge positive, negative and neutral opinions for all manner of products, policies, or people.

As mentioned in my previous article, a social media sentiments project was implemented locally in May 2013. ABS-CBN Integrated News and Current Affairs (INCA) collaborated with IBM Philippines to utilize its deep data analytics expertise and patented tools in analyzing public interactions on social media that helped made better sense of the social media activities (FB & Twitter) in the recent mid-term elections.

As technology’s ability to extract a valuable signal from the noisy flow of social media improves, it offers a tool to help brands identify trends sooner than their competitors.

Another wrinkle in the emerging discipline of social sentiment analysis is that many signals are emerging in relatively obscure niches across the web.

Real life

Social media also captures very real, often frustrating, aspects of daily life. Indeed, as much as we’re likely to post praise about a preferred product, it’s only human nature that we are more vocal, more often about daily hiccups in our routine.

In the Philippines, we see constant comments about traffic and commuter delays which are deep, persistent signal in any real-time sampling of social media posts. And while most individuals fire off these complaints in frustration—with little hope they’ll make a difference—cities are exploring how these e-gripes can help optimize city operations.

Consumers and citizens are actively telling us where their preferences are, and where problem spots are. For CMOs and city planners alike, the challenge is finding the best ways to listen and respond.

The tools to do so—by turning the din of social chatter into actionable signals—are here today and can help marketers deliver better products and day-to-day services to their customers.

(The author is the Country Manager for Marketing of IBM Philippines).