Tag: social analytics

EA: Why Being Worst Matter More than They Think?

It seems that beating the tobacco companies and those behind environmental negligence to the title of ‘Worst Company in America’ has not been an exercise in humility for Electronic Arts

 

In a statement to Gamer web site Kontaku, EA said “We’re sure that British Petroleum, AIG, Philip Morris, and Halliburton are all relieved they weren’t nominated this year. We’re going to continue making award-winning games and services played by more than 300 million people worldwide.”

 

The statement was described as arrogant and dismissive by Paul Tassi, Forbes contributor. I would add short sighted too.

 

EA are pointing to their worldwide sales achievement to dismiss the vote as inconsequential. However, what they are forgetting in their hubris is that sales is the classic ‘lagging’ indicator. Sales are recorded monthly and publicly announced quarterly and annually in most businesses. Sentiment, on the other hand, is a leading indicator. A dip in employee engagement means that customers are about to become unhappy. A dip in customer sentiment means that your sales are about to be hit. Robert Kaplan and David Norton introduced the business world to this cause-and-effect chain decades ago. Customers drive revenues, your business produces value that your customers love or hate, your staff drive the business, your investment in your staff motivates or demotivates them. Simple but a point that the EA spokesman appears to be missing.

 

Now I don’t know the extent to which gamers are about to extract their ire but I do know when a company has spoken too soon. And EA have. EA should reflect on the feedback. Their customers are telling them that they don’t feel respected, that their culture is corporate over creativity, that they are emptying wallets but giving only the bare minimum back.

 

In the light of that sentiment, they should really not be sitting on laurels made of  last quarter’s or last year’s sales. They are gone. Sentiment like this can gather momentum, capture the imagination of a well connected community and have far reaching consequences down the line.  EA should have thought before they spoke. The impact of  the ignominy behind this award is yet to be felt.

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Enterprise Social Circles

Paul Adams,  Facebook Product Manager and former Social researcher at Google led the charge into Social Circles.  Quite frankly, according to Adams, ‘Friends’ really didn’t cover it. We have family relationships, relationships with our colleagues and closer ‘besty’ friends. We also have relationships that are built during life stages (university) or around hobbies (football teams, diving) and those that are built because of locality (neighbours)

 

These are all social circles appropriate to (what I call) lifestyle social circles. But what about our professional social circles? Professional social circles, professional communities are built in Social platforms like LinkedIn or inside our own organisation. These circles, or communities, also include life (or career) stage communities such as inductees and locality (same office) But what other types of professional social circles are there? Some might be functional, customer specific, product or service specific?

 

I would welcome your suggestions and comments here:

Social Media Listening, Lets Call the Whole Thing Off?

The couple in Ira Gershwin’s song Lets call the whole thing off  lamented the way they pronounced the same words differently because it exposed class differences which might eventually be their undoing. Human communication is a funny thing. If Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers had met on Facebook then regardless of how they pronounced neither, either and tomato, they would have assumed that they, like the spelling, were a perfect match.

Understanding nuance in human communication is a preoccupation for those of us building social media analytic applications and specifically as it applies to the Social Listening process. Social listening is the data collection process in a social media analytics application, the point at which the vast sea of blog, editorial and social media content is collected and converted into usable analysis. The purpose of Social Listening is to collect and filter ‘mentions’, instances of the company, brand, product or marketing campaign being referenced in an item of online content. Most platforms are good at collecting mentions but many fail in their level of accuracy, not because of scale and volume but because they don’t understand the human capacity for saying the same thing in so many different ways.

Fred and Ginger were both speaking (American) English and yet still had problems because language is only one of the many considerations when we try to understand the written word. Slang, regional idioms and differences in style relating to social groupings, profession, generation and gender are just a few others.

Anyone with teenage children can tell you about generational language differences. At one time my Son and his friends frequently used the expression ‘you just got pwned’ or ‘he pwned me’ usually but not exclusively when gaming. It describes the process of being decisively and unambiguously beaten by a competitor. ‘Pwned’ is a corruption of ‘owned’ attributed to a mis-spelling by a world of warcraft map designer and for some reason it fell into common usage. Unlike much of what we deal with in information systems, there is no rule, no derivation, it is simply something which is known. Without this knowledge what would a social media monitoring platform make of the tweet ‘coke pwns pepsi’ (or the other way around, of course)?

Other differences are equally obtuse. Take emoticons. Baby boomers rarely use them, gen-X ers commonly use them and gen Y-ers use them but differently. A gen-X er is more likely to use 🙂 and a gen -Y er 🙂 Very little difference to the human eye but in traditional text filters they simply don’t match.

Many are a little surprised when I point out that the author’s gender makes a difference to the language used. Of course, women might be more likely to discuss hormone replacement therapies and men more likely to discuss male pattern baldness if they are blogging about their mid-life crisis but given a gender-neutral topic, men and women still use different language. One website, gender genie, can identify the gender of the author of a piece of text with a surprisingly high degree of accuracy.

What does all of this mean? It means that Social Media Analytics platforms have to understand the rich, inconsistent and unfathomable ways in which we all converse. To get more specific and technical, social listening must employ linguistic variant sets to accurately disambiguate language variations. Simply put, they must be able to handle a set of alternative way of saying the same thing. Social listening must be inclusive of all diversity regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, social status, profession and yes, sexuality before they can capture data suitable for the purpose of analytics. Otherwise, you might as well just call the whole thing off.

 

Also reproduced for IBM Vision for the IT expert community.

The Social Triangle: Business, Brand and Analytics

Social TriangleMention social and we immediately think about the dizzying number of people using Facebook and, as businesses, how we reach them as customers or prospective customers.

 

This is only part of the story though.  Today, my own business, a provider of information software and services, will not find it’s customers on Facebook however hard we look.  However, this doesn’t mean that social isn’t relevant to us. That would be a limiting and ‘traditional’ view of Social as a Brand only which is a single point on the Social Triangle.

 

Michael Brito, SVP of Edelman Digital, commented in a recent article on Brainyard distinguished between the Social Business and the Social Brand.  The Social Brand, he argues, is a company, product, or individual that uses social technologies to communicate with social customers, their partners and constituencies, or the public. The Social Business, on the other hand, is one that has integrated and operationalized social media within job functions internally. The third point on the triangle is Analytics, the practical use of information to make decisions.

 

The aspiration is that both Brand and Business are for engagement not just broadcasting and that Analytics is used as actionable information. Let me offer an example.

 

I recently tried to book a London hotel room for my Son because he had a very early train journey on the Eurostar. I wanted to pay so that it was one less thing for him to be concerned about at 4am. I made an advanced reservation and several days, calls, emails and faxes (yes faxes) later and the hotel chain could still not confirm this part of the arrangement. Whilst I don’t do this often, I resorted to tweeting a #fail.

 

What happened next was pure Social Brand. A number of other hotel chains messaged me to offer me deals in London Hotels. Indeed, they still do. It left an overriding impression that everyone listened but no one heard.

 

A Social Business with a Social Brand using Social Analytics would have behaved completely differently. The tweet would have appeared in a dashboard and tagged as negative sentiment and that this related to dissatisfaction with the booking process.  Social Analytics would have been able to identify that I was a frequent traveller with children in university and that I was highly likely to use UK hotels over the coming 12 months. Social analytics would also have been able to identify the level of influence I have with others in this socio and demographic group (not as high as I think)

 

The information would have been shared around the organisation not just Marketing and it would have been shared efficiently using social tools not email.   A customer services representative may have tried to resolve the specific for me but the general issue would have found it’s way to a manager responsible for the booking process after which a decision will be made to  either fix this in their booking systems to attract other ‘surrogate bookers’ or to continue to deal with it as exception or even to do nothing. Next time a frustrated parent booking arrived everyone would know how to handle it or what the policy was because the whole dialogue would have been captured and tagged in a searchable activity stream. The marketing team might even build a new campaign that focused on how they understand their customers better and the ease of parental bookings.

 

A Social Brand engages in meaningful dialogue with it’s customers, a Social Business engages a motivated workforce to fix problems or to exploit new opportunities. Finally Social Analytics keep the whole process informed with timely and relevant information so that the focus is on the right customers and products and that effective, insightful and informed decisions are made.

Social Analytics … At a Glance

First off, let me stipulate that I absolutely support the notion that technologists of a certain age (let’s go with over 40) should regularly evaluate what they need to ‘unlearn’ in order to make way for new thinking.

However, some older techniques really do stand the test of time when attempting to understand new concepts. Take Social Analytics. It’s a hot topic and information specialists are trying to get their heads around what it it and what the business benefits are.

To help me understand, I started researching in the usual way. Books, white papers, articles and opinion. But as I did so, I drew up a ‘Dimension Map’ and a list of questions. Two simple devices that are as useful today in clarifying information requirements and their usefulness as they were err, a few years ago.

The first, a dimension map, has as it’s columns, the dimensions of measurement. So a revenue dimension map would typically have columns for product, customer etc. The rows are hierarchical levels so time (and most things are measured over time) might be years, months and days. The final column is a list of metrics. These are the measurements that can be analysed by the dimensions so a revenue dimension map would include sales value, sales qty. Easy, right. The social media dimension map below is very much a work in progress but I trust you find it useful as a ‘Social Analytics at a Glance’ diagram from which you can expand your thinking in the way that I intend to.

The question list is self explanatory but is a really simple and illustrative way to remind us that the purpose of information is to make decisions by answering business questions.

Social Analytics Dimension Map

Questions;

  1. Who does or does not like me|my product|my campaign|my brand?
  2. Who influences my customers?
  3. Do influencers like me|my product|my campaign|my brand?
  4. Are my customers talking more about me|my product|my campaign|my brand? than my competitors? i.e what is my share of voice?
  5. What are my customers saying about my competitor? i.e. what are the competitive opportunities or threats?

Big Data Analytics: Size is not important

There was a time when databases came in desktop, departmental and  enterprise sizes.  There was nothing larger than ‘enterprise’ and very few enterprises needed databases that scaled to what was the largest imaginable unit of data, the terabyte. They even named a database after it.

We now live in the world of the networked enterprise. Last year, according to the IDC, the digital universe totalled 1.2 zettabytes of data. And we are only at the beginning of the explosion which is set to grow by as much as 40 times by 2020. Massive data sets are being generated by web logs, social networks, connected devices and RFID tags. This is even before we connect our fridges (and we will) to the internet. Data volumes are growing at such a click that we needed a new term, Big Data (I know) to describe it.

What is meant by ‘big’ is highly subjective but the term is loosely used to  describe volumes of data that can not be dealt with by a conventional RDBMS running on conventional hardware. That is to say, alternative approaches to software, hardware or data architectures (Hadoop, map reduce, columnar, distributed data processing etc) are required.

Big Data is not just more of the same though.  Big Data is fundamentally different. It’s new and new data can present new opportunities. According to  the Mckinsey Global Institute the use of big data is a key way for leading companies to outperform their peers. Leading retailers, like Tesco, are already using big data to take even more market share.

This is because Big Data represents a fundamental shift from capturing transactions for analysis to capturing interactions. The source of todays analytic applications are customer purchases, product returns and  supplier purchase orders whilst Big Data captures every customer click and conversation. It can capture each and every interaction. This represents an extraordinary opportunity to capture, analyse and understand what customers really think about products and services or how they are responding to a marketing campaign as the campaign is running.

Deriving analytics from big data, from content, unstructured data and natural language conversations requires a  new approach. In spite of the name though, it’s less about the size and more about the structure (or absence of structure) and level at which organisations can now understand their businesses and their customers.