Going Global With Social Media Analytics Iraklis Varlamis Assistant Professor Harokopio University of Athens, Dept. of Informatics & Telematics varlamis@hua.gr Athens 2015
Thinking of going global? Going global is the worldwide movement toward economic, financial, trade, and communications integration. Going global is a composite and hard task You must consider The product The market The competitors, and many more Athens 2015 2
Stategies Start global Radical Innovation - you have a technology that will revolutionize the market Disruptive Innovation a new product in an existing market that disrupts the market path Grow global Sustaining innovation - a better product for existing market niche or low cost alternative Athens 2015 3
Starting global - Radical Innovation Good news: Investors love it the returns are potentially huge the competition may not be established or even well defined. The bad news: success is rare as soon as you get the market to pay attention, someone develops the Disruptive Tech to compete with you. This is the ideal technology to take to a global market especially if the largest market is overseas Athens 2015 4
Starting global - Disruptive Innovation You offer a cheaper or simpler or convenient alternative to something that is already popular Opportunity: A significant market segment does not need or desire the optimal technology they are very happy with a product that meets their minimum requirements A forgotten or neglected area of innovation, because the innovator is focused on the optimal benefit or performance of the innovation Athens 2015 5
Consider startup accelerators http://www.startupfactories.eu/ http://www.alphagamma.eu/entrepreneurshi p/best-startup-accelerator-programs-ineurope/ https://www.fiware.org/accelerators/ Athens 2015 6
Grow global Sustaining Innovation You improve your product performance and increase customer satisfaction Opportunity: You can fuel the short-term growth of your company Established market leaders are extremely good at dealing with and exploiting sustaining innovations The technology is mature but there is always place for improvement Athens 2015 7
Before going global How do you stand in your local market? Assess the competition Assess the market How stable is your position? Is it capable to support mid or long-term expansion plans Athens 2015 8
Readiness check Are you ready to go global? Is there a customer base in the countries you want to enter? Is the foreign market compatible to your market? Do you have resources and staff to focus on both expansion and established business? Athens 2015 9
Challenges of going international Language and cultural barriers Tax codes and compliance issues Slower (or faster) pace Local competition Athens 2015 10
Key elements Team: Hire a great team, find the right partner(s), diversify roles The product: Remain consistent in branding The market: Consider the impact of any new ideas, perform a market validation The competition: Always do your due diligence on business strategy The money: Check your capital management skills, make sure that you can handle funds and tax issues arising from global business plans Athens 2015 11
10 steps for expanding globally Perform a Deep Dive Due Diligence Develop a Strategy and Business Plan Establish a Strong Team Product Readiness Organizational Readiness Establish a Go-to-Market Strategy Legal Readiness Tax and Finance Readiness Prepare Your Final Budget Preparation Establish Close Relationships with Local Businesses D. Day, M. Evans, 10 Key Steps To Expanding Your Business Globally. Forbes, March 4th 2015 Athens 2015 12
Enough about business Let s focus on technology How technology can help you go/grow global? We will examine this through the prism of a Greek company: Palo Ltd Athens 2015 13
Challenges when you go global Global vs. Localized Processes Deployment strategy (and cycle) Multilingual content Scalability Collaboration and Communication between the Global Team Athens 2015 14
About Palo Ltd Currently manages and operates: two innovative online/mobile services palo news aggregator websites and Palo news digest (mob app) in Greece, Cyprus, Serbia, Turkey and Romania an innovative online service palopro online reputation management monitoring system 15
www.palo.gr 22 ads (in palo.gr) >45 ads in all sites 8 free widgets for your site Public Open data reports 1 editorial per day 16
digest.palo.gr 17
pro.palo.gr 18
In the backend A focused crawler that collects news articles from sites, blogs and social media A text clustering module that groups similar articles together A text summarization module that creates a unique summary for each group of articles A named entity extraction module that detects Named Entities (people, places, companies etc) in any text A sentiment analysis module that assigns sentiment to each named entity separately 19
And what is so special? Crawler: A new palo.?? site can be launched in 2 months Content is collected from news sites even when they do not offer RSS. Page wrappers are automatically created 20
What else? Clustering: You can have all the articles (and media) written for the same subject in a single point 21
What else? Summarization: You can read a summary of the event when you don t have time In Palo Digest summaries come first! 22
And what about businesses? An interactive, customizable dashboard, with all mentions for your Entity (brand name, products, campaigns) 23
Real time monitoring Custom dashboards can be build in a few hours for the Sept 2015 political debate 24
Some numbers Countries Volume Precision 5: Greece, Serbia, Cyprus, Romania, Turkey >85.000 texts/hour (at peek time for Greece only) >200.000 news articles per day >1.5 million sources > 20 million records per month from social media >1 million entities >3 million entity terms Sentiment >87% in sentence level >70% in entity level Named Entity Recognition >70% (at 60% recall) 25
The processing pipeline 26
Infrastracture Rack #1 3 Database Servers - MySQL Cluster - ElasticSearch Cluster - Palo Services 2 Web Servers (Varnich) 1 Back-back Server 1 Load balancer Server 1 Mail/Alerting Server Rack #2 2 Database Servers - MySQL - Palo Services 2 Web Servers 2 SQL Servers (cluster) 2 Storage Servers (backup) 1 Server (Palo Services) 1 Caching Server (Varnish) 27
And how you manage to go global? All text processing algorithms are language independent Machine learning proves to be better than rules and templates Yes, we use (open) language resources to improve performance Yes, we train our algorithms to further improve performance We do this, only when it is needed We create tools (annotators etc) to do it faster 28
Sources Books The Innovator s Solution Christensen/Raynor, 2003, Harvard Univ. Press Innovation Overseas - Christensen, Anthony and Roth, 2009, Harvard Univ. Press. Articles N. Tsirakis, I. Varlamis, V. Poulopoulos, P. Tsantilas, PaloPro: monitoring the public opinion in social media and news streams. Journal of Systems and Software, Elsevier. 2016, submitted. I. Varlamis, P. Tsantilas, V. Vassalos, et al, PaloPro: A platform for knowledge extraction from big social data and the news, International Journal of Big Data Intelligence, Inderscience 2016, to appear. N. Tsirakis, V. Poulopoulos, P. Tsantilas, I. Varlamis", A platform for real-time opinion mining from social media and news streams", in Proc. of the 1st IEEE International Workshop on Real Time Data Stream Analytics, in conjunction with IEEE BigDataSE-15, 2015, Helsinki, Finland. I. Varlamis, N. Tsirakis, V. Poulopoulos, P. Tsantilas, "An Automatic Wrapper Generation Process for Large Scale Crawling of News Websites", In 18th Panhellenic Conference on Informatics (PCI 2014), 2-4 Oct, 2014, Athens, Greece. Links http://www.forbes.com/sites/allbusiness/2015/03/04/10-key-steps-to-expanding-your-businessglobally/ www.paloservices.com Athens 2015 29
Iraklis Varlamis Harokopio University of Athens, Dept. of Informatics & Telematics varlamis@hua.gr Athens 2015