Beyond listening Driving better decisions with business intelligence from social sources

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1 Beyond listening Driving better decisions with business intelligence from social sources From insight to action with IBM Social Media Analytics State of the Union Opinions prevail on the Internet Social media has changed the way we communicate, work and live. More than just the millennial generation is engaging online. Sharing opinions and experiences with a world of virtual friends and followers has become the new norm. This environment presents both challenges and potential benefits for businesses trying to employ social channels to create and solidify customer relationships. This social community engagement has given a sense of empowerment to consumers. Buying patterns and behaviors have forever been altered by the constant availability of online channels where consumers can research reviews, learn more about a product or service and compare prices. This is the culmination of the power of word of mouth combined with the ease of immediate access to social venues through the Internet, allowing anyone to comment or share an opinion. News of a great product can spread like wildfire. News of a bad product or a negative experience can spread just as quickly. And the comments and opinions have a long shelf life on the web. Consumers are holding organizations accountable and are sharing their personal experiences with the world.

2 Stop, look and listen Organizations can t help but take notice of all this online sentiment and opinion. Capitalizing on it has become an industry unto itself, known as social analytics. Harnessing sentiment and opinion data to engage customers and understand their preferences is known as social listening. It is the most prevalent form of social analytics today. But is listening in on social media conversations enough? Mining social media sites to extract gems of valuable opinion data is an increasingly important priority for organizations seeking new ways of engaging and being responsive to customers. Yet the enormous quantities of unstructured, predominantly text data found in social media can be cumbersome and unwieldy to work with unless you have the necessary tools to do so. Beyond listening Industry analysts are forecasting a rapid shift in the use of social media analytics, away from basic listening to a strategy of employing more advanced analytics to help predict customer behavior and recommend actions that will help influence that behavior. Advanced social media analytics give organizations the ability to capture and analyze big data quantities of social media content, segment customers in new ways and develop the ability to predict which actions will be the most effective in attracting and retaining customers. Advanced social media analytics can help organizations answer questions like: What will our customers want next? What is on the customers wish list when it comes to desired features in our new product? Will customers remain loyal or are they looking to defect to a competitor? What do customers find appealing in the products or services of our competitors? Transform insight into actionable business intelligence can help organizations transform massive volumes of social media data into highly effective business insights and actions. Built on the leading IBM analytics platform, it can be used to analyze the impact of social media across a wide range of critical functions such as marketing, customer service, product development and supply chain. analyzes billions of pieces of social media data and provides the results of that analysis in customized, configurable, easy-to-understand charts and dashboards. With key behavioral, demographic, geographic, influencer analysis and advanced analytics discovery capabilities, helps organizations go beyond listening so they can act upon their insights quickly and solve business problems. 2

3 How does it work? retrieves data in the form of fragments or snippets of text from publicly available social media channels, based on queries that search for specific words or phrases. The data collected in the search result is then loaded into a database and made available for analysis. The solution includes pre-defined dashboards that make it easy to share insights across the organization. What users can discover with Behavioral insights: Classify the behavior of specific social media participants by placing them in the categories of user, prospective user, recommender or detractor. Segmentation: Categorize your audience by geography, gender, marital status, parental status, and influencer scores to help you determine precisely who is commenting on your key topics. Share of voice: Understand the prevalence and intensity of social media conversations regarding your brand, products, services, company reputation or any other topic you would like to explore. Affinity relationships: Analyze the relationship between any two dimensions or any two attributes within a dimension by measuring the degree of affinity between them. Learn if one characteristic of a product significantly affects the perception of other product characteristics. (For example, how does price affect perceptions of product quality?) Sentiment: Measure the tone and intent of large volumes of conversations across multiple social media channels. Sentiment analysis indicates whether a particular consumer comment is positive, negative, neutral or ambivalent toward the topics of interest. Evolving topics: Use clustering analysis to group related keywords that appear frequently within snippets of conversations to provide a logical summary of the discussions in the data. determines which snippets share the same terms and then derives topics from these terms. Evolving topic analysis allows you to follow trends and common discussion topics across time periods and in reference to related keywords. How can I use IBM Social Media Analytics in my organization? Designed for more than just marketing use, IBM Social Media Analytics can deliver insights that are of value to many departments and lines of business across an organization. There are countless use cases or methodologies that you can create to explore information about your brand, your market, your organization or your competitors. With IBM Social Media Analytics, you can create models specific to your own business needs and gain valuable insights from customer conversations and comments posted in publicly available social media sources. 3

4 Below are some examples of the use cases that IBM Social Media Analytics would enable you to build. Business function or industry Use case Goal Marketing Product marketing Gauge the success of a new product launch Determine the reputation of a brand Refine campaigns and select exclusive offers Personalize offers, rewards and messaging Corporate HQ Communications Evaluate corporate reputation Determine the reputation of a brand Customer service Customer engagement Enhance customer loyalty and retention Sales Sales enablement Deliver customer segmentation data to sales teams based on their unique territory needs and differences Human resources Employer reputation Evaluate reputation as an employer Supply chain Process flow Mitigate supply chain risk Evaluate partner reputations Determine product hot spots for inventory control and balancing Finance Risk management Mitigate regulatory compliance risk Government and politics Municipal government Enhance constituent services Better understand citizen concerns Improve services based on citizen priorities Public safety Tourism planning Political campaigns Track trends and crime patterns Supplement criminal investigations Determine innovations and new promotional options to attract visitors Determine the reputation of a candidate Check the pulse of the electorate Evaluate other candidates running for the same office Build a profile of the person most likely to vote for a candidate Academic Higher education Manage your institutional reputation Attract new students Increase student retention Improve fundraising and alumni relationships Determine post-education job placement success of graduates Evaluate campus infrastructure and security issues 4

5 How has it worked for others? Supply chain A major athletic shoe manufacturer learned from social media sources that demand for their soon-to-belaunched, retro-styled sneaker was greatest in the southeastern United States. As a result, they were able to increase their supply levels in that region in order to launch their product successfully where consumer demand was highest. Sales enablement A pharmaceutical company needed a way to leverage its investment in social media to secure leads for its regional sales teams and business partners. The company chose SaaS (Software-as-a- Service) to collect geographic details and other segmentation data, which it then aggregated, analyzed and sent to an application created specifically for the sales teams. The combination of and their own internal IT processes produced an even more powerful tool for the company. It enabled their sales teams to get customer leads more quickly and be more responsive and agile in the marketplace. Higher education Colleges and universities are quickly learning the benefits of social media analytics. They are using it to monitor concerns about campus environment and infrastructure, track their institutional reputations, and gather information on the post graduation job placement success of their graduates. In the highly competitive higher education market, having insight into the opinions of your target customers can help you refine your messages to that audience and empower your organization with useful knowledge. Municipal government A city in France uses IBM Social Media Analytics to capture and analyze citizen comments posted on public social media. After collecting and analyzing more than 1.6 million comments in the first year of implementation, the city was able to accelerate the average response time on road-maintenance issues by 93 percent. The city is now looking at other uses for IBM Social Media Analytics to help it refine its reputation as a future-focused government. How can you build your own use case? When you begin to use, it is important to outline your goals and identify the information that you are seeking. What is it that you want to know or need to know and what do you plan to do with the information? IBM Social Media Analytics is software that you can grow with and it enables you to refine your process with each use. Engaging resources from other departments or areas of the business is a good first step in identifying whether you need to evaluate risks, determine your brand reputation, seek the opinions of the social community to help develop a new product, determine the direction of the market and more. It is also important to determine which internal department will lead this effort. To begin, start by asking the following questions: What is the most important goal for this project? What do we hope to learn? What challenges could social media insights help us address? What areas of the organization need this insight? Should we begin with a smaller project first or try to capture everything we can right away? Do we have an action plan for how to respond to the things we discover? Conclusion As social media becomes more ingrained in our culture and our daily lives, its power to influence the value of brands and companies grows with every new blog or public forum posting. The ability of to help you harness this energy understand its content, distribution and influence can reshape the way you engage with your customers and broader constituencies, transforming relationships to brands, products and services and improving your bottom line. And with being offered as a cloud service, it is easy for organizations to get up and running quickly and without the cost or complexity of involving their IT organizations. Visit IBM.com to learn more about. 5

6 About IBM IBM software delivers data-driven insights that help organizations work smarter and outperform their peers. This comprehensive portfolio includes solutions for business intelligence, predictive analytics and decision management, performance management, and risk management. solutions enable companies to identify and visualize trends and patterns in areas, such as customer analytics, that can have a profound effect on business performance. They can compare scenarios, anticipate potential threats and opportunities, better plan, budget and forecast resources, balance risks against expected returns and work to meet regulatory requirements. By making analytics widely available, organizations can align tactical and strategic decision-making to achieve business goals. For further information please visit ibm.com/business-analytics. Request a call To request a call or to ask a question, go to ibm.com/businessanalytics/contactus. An IBM representative will respond to your inquiry within two business days. Copyright IBM Corporation 2014 IBM Corporation Software Group Route 100 Somers, NY Produced in the United States of America June 2014 IBM, the IBM logo and ibm.com are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at Copyright and trademark information at This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by IBM at any time. Not all offerings are available in every country in which IBM operates. THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED AS IS WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANT- ABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF NON-INFRINGEMENT. IBM products are warranted according to the terms and conditions of the agreements under which they are provided. Please Recycle YTS03087-USEN-00