The Challenge
In today’s world, online channels have evolved into powerful mediums and are more effective tools than traditional marketing and advertising are. To leverage these channels, the client wanted Evalueserve to undertake in-depth research and analytics exercise in the smart cities space to understand the key topics being discussed in the US and the UK.
The client wanted to leverage social media platforms to conduct an Active Online Listening (AOL) project, to help generate better insights around smart cities and understand key topics being discussed. The client’s brand would utilize these insights for thought leadership initiatives.
Our Solution
Evalueserve used its two-pronged Research-augmented Social Listening approach, which is a combination of:
Active Online Listening:
• Data consolidation from multiple sources to identify key topics, influencers and sentiments around ‘smart cities’
• Trend analysis to discover key trending themes / topics and most popular media channels, and also determining stand-out differences among markets
• Answering key questions, such as the buzz around smart cities and the most influential spokespersons / companies
Research to Augment Social Listening:
• Adding a layer of in-depth research to AOL, with a relatively large manual component, to validate information gathered in the first phase and to plug any data gaps
Evalueserve used its mind+machine approach to extract and analyze large volumes of social data from various social media sources, such as Facebook, Twitter, digital journals, and articles.
The team’s industry expertise, along with its research and analytics capabilities, helped the client deep-dive on the smart cities space. Analytical tools such as web crawlers were used to extract ~120k records for both the US and the UK. These extensive datasets were then cleaned and filtered using text analytics to remove noise and mine all the relevant information.
Business Impact
Of the 20,680 relevant comments mined and gathered across social media sources, 84% of the total mentions were from the US and 16% from the UK. Most of the buzz originated from Twitter, followed by traditional media. The amount of data captured from blogs, forums, and Facebook was minimal.
The team also prepared a detailed report, highlighting results on:
• Key themes
• Key influencers
• Key companies talking about smart cities
• Key events related to smart cities
• Key initiatives companies organized / participated in
Evalueserve also highlighted differences among the markets, namely on the nature / tone of conversations, types of events being held, etc.
As a result of this study, the client was able to not only develop an understanding of the key topics being discussed across social media sources but also further utilizing these insights for its internal and external initiatives, prioritizing investment areas, etc.
Recommendations
Increase the company’s influencer quotient
- More conversations should be driven by the company’s leadership team, from its official pages / handles, to popularize a topic, build greater brand recall, and lend an authoritative voice to the content
Participate more in events / conferences
Build partnerships that help build recall
• Build partnerships – by co-authoring publications, co-sponsoring events and sponsoring research studies / offering grants, etc. – with key influencers such as academicians, researchers, bloggers, and NGOs to increase brand recall and influence
