Is analyzing social media a necessity for today’s
businesses? To answer this question, let’s consider these
facts: If Facebook was a country it would have been the third
biggest country in the world. Facebook has over 1.15 billion
monthly active users out of which 82 million monthly active users
are from India. As of March 2013, Twitter had 200 million active
users creating over 400 million tweets each day. Nearly one in five
individuals now looks to Facebook to obtain information about a
brand or product, as per a Fleishman-Hillard and Harris Interactive
Annual Global Study.
Social media, hence, has truly arrived as a huge listening and
customer engagement channel for enterprises to better connect with
their customers.
Social networking sites offer huge opportunities to
organizations to create products and messaging that is more
engaging and connect to their customers in a much better fashion.
Apart from this, the medium also allows organizations to get unique
insights like customer buying behaviour and spending
patterns.
“The amount of social interactions and engagement has been
steadily increasing in India and each social/digital interaction
leads to the creation of data, which has potential to share
valuable insights. Consumers are a lot more empowered today —
they chat, create, share, comment, post and review. It is
sacrosanct to listen closely to their views and preferences,”
asserts Sudipta K Sen, Regional Director – South East Asia,
CEO & Managing Director - SAS Institute (India).
In fact, a recent McKinsey Global Institute report states that
companies that rely on brand recognition can increase margins by as
much as 60 percent by using social technologies to connect with
customers and to generate sharper consumer insights.
Social interactions have been steadily increasing in India
and each interaction leads to the creation of data, which has
potential to share valuable insights
Sudipta K Sen, Regional Director – South East Asia, CEO &
Managing Director - SAS Institute (India)
However, given the unstructured nature of data generated on
social media channels, it is a major challenge for organizations to
gauge and measure insights from the huge volume of data generated.
Thus, organizations are increasingly contemplating smarter analytic
solutions to gain new insights from social media to better
understand consumer preferences, market dynamics, brand affinity
and to improve customer satisfaction, and make smarter decisions
regarding marketing campaigns.
Derek Laney, Director - Product Marketing Management, Marketing
Cloud, Salesforce.com corroborates the trend, “Today, C-level
executives in both B2B and B2C segments are very keen to understand
how they should go about setting up social technologies to take
advantage of these opportunities and derive business
benefits.”
This is where major enterprise vendors such as Oracle, software
service firms like Persistent Systems and analytic firms such as
SAS are sensing a golden opportunity in developing social media
analytics solutions and are meticulously crafting strategies to
target this space.
Let’s a take a look at some of the players in the social
analytics space and how their offerings are helping organizations.
TURNING CONNECTIONS INTO CUSTOMERS
Salesforce is targeting the space with Salesforce Marketing
Cloud (SMC), a unified social marketing suite that enables
organizations to identify sales leads, discover advocates, detect
trends for any topic or keyword, uncover social influence and
analyze content in 17 languages. “55 percent of the Fortune
100 and leading brands including Ford, Hewlett-Packard, and
Unilever are turning connections into customers for life with the
Marketing Cloud,” says Laney.
Today, C-level executives in both B2B and B2C segments are
very keen to understand how they should go about setting up social
technologies
Derek Laney, Director - Product Marketing Management, Marketing
Cloud, Salesforce.com
Hardware major Dell is one of the company’s clients, which
is using SMC to gain a better understanding of the marketplace and
build long lasting relationships with customers. With SMC, Dell is
able to monitor over 25,000 conversations each month in 11
different languages. When Dell sees customers talking about buying
a new laptop, or about server requirements, it engages with
consumers to find out what they are looking for, sends them
coupons, or directs their request to the right people within the
organization. By adopting a proactive social strategy, the company
has been able to fuel its sales leads. “In its first year of
experimentation alone, Dell generated approximately USD 6.5 million
sales through social media,” informs Laney.
The company’s another customer is United Spirits, which is
using social media to connect with its customers about topics of
their interest like sports, fashion and music.
Similarly, Oracle has introduced cloud-based Social Relationship
Management (SRM) solutions that enable organizations to transform
business processes with innovative social collaboration, marketing
and insight services. Oracle’s SRM solutions simplify the
deployment of social business applications through cloud delivery,
mobile access, and integration with key business
applications.
“By integrating the full spectrum of social activities and
analysis in a single platform, Oracle SRM eliminates the
inconsistency, duplication and delays of ‘social silos’
to enable users to create, measure, and consistently deliver more
rewarding customer experiences,” says Sunil Jose, Vice
President – Applications, Oracle India. A component of SRM
suite, the Oracle Social Engagement & Monitoring Cloud Service
provides listening, engagement and analysis capabilities across
social channels to help companies understand their customers and
act.
Another company betting big on social media analytics is
Persistent Systems, which classifies the social analytics space in
three broad areas, namely customer segmentation, branding and
customer engagement and customer service and voice of customer
management. In customer segmentation, social data is used to create
accurate customer segmentation, which can then be used to make the
right kind of offers and promotions for the segment.
Kartik Vyas, Head Big Data Marketing at Persistent Systems,
explains this with an example, “If Micromax is planning to
launch a mobile handset model specially targeted at music lovers in
the age bracket 22 to 32, publicly available social data, such as
Facebook page likes can be used to segment the customers
accurately. If a person likes fan pages of musicians, music shows,
writes about concerts, etc., it means that the person is more
likely to be interested in the handset for music lovers as compared
to someone who has most page likes for stuff related to cricket or
fashion.”
For branding and customer engagement, the company suggests
analysis of responses to advertising and branding campaigns.
“Sentiment analysis of responses of customers on the brand
fan page, nature of response to contests etc., can be analyzed to
fine tune the messaging and improve customer engagement,”
says Vyas. In the customer service and voice of customer management
space, Persistent suggests text analytics of complaints and
customer feedback expressed on social forums and other sites on the
web.
Giving insights on how the company derives trends from social data,
Vyas says, “We have built several connectors, which connect
with social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and crawl public
data with regards to a specific organization or entity from these
sites. This data, once collected, is analyzed on a Hadoop-based
social media analytics platform that we have built. Our platforms
can automatically tag and cluster user responses. Once these
responses are tagged and clustered, our analysts and data
scientists pick out trends and help our customer organizations
understand these trends from the data. Organizations can then
quickly respond to these trends.”
T20 cricket league is a case in point, where Persistent released
a dashboard to figure out the popularity of players and teams based
on the analysis of tweet messages that were posted during the
tournament. Further, for one of its customers the company has
automated its customer relationship management system in such a
fashion, that any social media message about the customers’
product would be responded to within 10 minutes of a message posted
on that forum.
The analytics firm SAS Institute’s social media strategy
surrounds around the fact that the value of social media analytics
enhances when organizations are able to integrate the insights
derived from social channels with their transactional data,
campaign management systems, call centres, etc. “We empower
users with superior social media and text analytics along with
multi-lingual capabilities, which is the key for a diversely and
densely populated nation like India. We also help organizations
integrate this data with other data sources, enhance the data and
derive meaningful insights from this comprehensive source of data,
in easy to understand formats which can be used by business users
and decision makers,” informs Sen.
The company enables this via simple and easy-to-use dashboards
that can be used across the enterprise. Real-time and approachable
analytics makes it possible for marketers to create offers and
delightful experiences for customers and prospects based on their
needs and via their preferred channel.
On similar lines, iGATE too is launching solutions in the
buzzing space with its dedicated Center of Excellence. For example,
the company has developed a solution especially targeted at
companies in the pharmaceutical space. A lot of drugs often have
side effects. It is a regulatory compliance in some companies that
all the side effects being talked about in the social space need to
be analyzed by the pharmaceutical company. To help companies meet
this compliance requirement, iGATE tracks social
conversations about any drug from public medical sites and provides
insights into the side effects that have not yet been explored.
“We search for unknown side effects about a particular drug
and then analyze the same using algorithms and advice the
organization about the social conversation,” says Anil
Bajpai, Senior Vice President and Head of Research and Innovation,
iGATE.
Source :
http://goo.gl/Stp0pt