SlideShare a Scribd company logo
1 of 10
Download to read offline
•	 Cognizant Reports

Social Media Analytics: Enabling
Intelligent, Real-Time Decision Making
Today, an increasing number of organizations rely on social media
for interacting internally, as well as with external constituents.
Using advanced and predictive analytics applied holistically via
a centralized “command center,” companies can mine growing pools
of unstructured data, deliver more timely and actionable insights,
and better inform business and operational strategies.

cognizant reports | August 2013
Executive Summary
With more than 1.5 billion users worldwide,1 social
media offers a treasure trove of information in
the form of real-time, interactive communications
made available through blogs, tweets, updates,
images and videos. Not surprisingly, organizations are growing more and more reliant on social
media to understand and work more responsively
with employees, vendors and customers, and better gauge the competition. However, mining and
analyzing the huge volumes of unstructured data
generated by social media is no easy task.
Using social media analytics, organizations
can mine and decipher vast amounts of data
from various social media platforms to discover
customer sentiment about brands, trends, the
issues customers face, the efficacy of marketing
campaigns and competitor intelligence, for example. Findings can be used by sales, marketing and
other functions to support more informed and
timely decisions. By adding predictive analytics,
organizations can more accurately forecast customer needs and behaviors, and anticipate and
deal with issues before they can damage the business’s reputation.
Yet achieving this level of knowledge can be a
real challenge. We have developed a framework,
LAEI, that allows companies to be successful in
their social media initiatives. The first step for
any organization is to listen to conversations.
This could be active listening using certain tools
and a dedicated team for owned and earned
media, or passive listening during a time of crisis.
Listening helps in collecting all the data, and
using the power of technology and human interactionsto analyze that data for business insights.
The next step in the journey is the most critical,
and one where we see most customers experience a disconnect. Once you have insights, it is
important to use them as part of your engagement strategy. This could be as simple as
responding back to one-on-one conversations
for customer service or as complex as using the
insights to drive content strategy for marketing.
The last step is to integrate the social data and
combine it with enterprise data to obtain the digital profile of your customer.
Organizations with limited capabilities and budgets can pursue analytics as a service (AaaS),
an emerging service delivery model that provides access to third-party specialists that can

cognizant reports

offer analytical insights – dynamically shifting
the cost of owning the technology infrastructure,
processes and talent from the organization to an
expert partner.

Driving Forces
The Rise of Social Media
According to an Experian Marketing Services
study,2 U.S. consumers spend 27% of their total
Internet time on social networking sites and
forums. Facebook has more than 1.1 billion active
users. Twitter, on average, records 58 million
tweets every day. These statistics, combined with
the millions of blog posts on the Internet and
discussions that occur by the minute on forums
and social networking sites, for example, can provide a rich and growing pool of data on market
trends and such things as consumer interests and
perceptions. Still, data is one thing; analyzing
it successfully to gain useful insights is quite
another.
The Growth of User-Generated Content
Many consumers enthusiastically post their experiences with brands and write product reviews on
various social media platforms like wikis, blogs
and social networking sites. Such user-generated
content (UGC) is perceived by pundits to carry
more value and make brands more trustworthy
than any company advertisement.
According to a 2012 Nielsen survey of 28,000
global Internet users, 92% of consumers trust
recommendations from friends and family more
than any other form of advertising. Seventy
percent of customers place their trust in online
consumer reviews – making this medium the
second most trusted form of advertising.3
Marketers, too, are encouraging users to comment, submit pictures and videos, rate products
and write reviews. However, user-generated content is mostly informal, and analyzing it can be
difficult – especially when trying to ascertain the
rationale underlying certain comments and ratings, what customer posts mean, and the significance of the type of medium used, for example.
The Challenge of Unstructured Data
According to Gartner, 80% of enterprise data –
documents, e-mails, call logs, corporate blogs
and the like – is unstructured (i.e., it does not fit
into any traditional database).4 The proliferating
use of social media data (including tweets and
comments in colloquial style, images, videos,

2
blog posts, etc.) is exponentially increasing the
amount of unstructured data to be sorted, analyzed and used to gain meaningful insights. Yet
most organizations do not have the resources or
tools needed to sift through and interpret the vast
quantities of social media data they have at their
disposal without making considerable changes to
their IT infrastructure, operational processes and
organizational structure.

brand mention, customer feedback and discussions, for example. The scope of data collection depends on the business purpose, such as
gauging the market’s perception of a new product, monitoring marketing campaigns, creating
brand awareness and performing competitor
intelligence. Data-gathering tools (free or subscription-based) can help organizations collect
customers’ tweets, blog posts, status updates,
etc., in real time from various social media
sites, based on pre-set search parameters. This
allows companies to track and respond to individual customer updates and tweets as soon as
they are received. For example, from Q2 2012 to
Q2 2013, brands improved their response rates
on Facebook by 143%, according to a survey
by Social Bakers. The airlines industry led in
social customer care by answering 79% of customer questions, closely followed by finance
(78%) and telecom (75%). Dutch airline KLM
is the most socially devoted brand – answering
98% of questions on Facebook at an average
response time of 45 minutes.6

While the “digerati” seem to agree that social
media data presents significant opportunities,
few organizations appear to have the strategies,
skills and tools in place to analyze the data. In
fact, analyzing and applying data of all types and
formats are the biggest data-related challenges
in 2013 for 45% of the 700 marketers surveyed
by Infogroup Targeting Solutions and Yesmail
Interactive (see Figure 1).5
Advanced social analytics can help organizations analyze and quickly draw inferences from
burgeoning unstructured social media and enterprise data, and convert it into actionable insights.

Harnessing Social Media Data Using
the LAEI Framework
In our view, organizations need a holistic strategy for exploiting social media’s full potential. We
recommend that companies build a social media
analytics framework around four critical steps –
listen, analyze, engage and integrate – to effectively use social media for intelligent decision
making (see sidebar, next page).

•	

Listen: The first step involves identifying and
collecting relevant social media data around

•	

Analyze: The next step involves analyzing
the collected data to understand customer
sentiment. However, the data will contain
plenty of irrelevant information – especially if
organizations use social media crawlers to find
comments with brand mention. This makes
it difficult to pin down what customers are
actually saying.

	 Removing the “noise” around the data will
help improve the accuracy of the analysis.
Semantic analysis is an advanced data-cleansing method that groups large amounts of data

Data Challenges in 2013
Hiring Qualified Employees

8%

Real-time Data Collection

11%

Collecting Data

11%

Protecting Customer Data and Privacy

12%

Cleaning Data

13%
20%

Applying Data
Analyzing Data

25%

Source: Infogroup Targeting Solutions and Yesmail Interactive, 2013
Figure 1

cognizant reports

3
segments based on their behavioral patterns. Segmentation helps shed light on
issues specific to each group, and address
group patterns as a whole. It can be used
to design marketing campaigns for each
target segment. For instance, marketers
can offer high-value customers greater
discounts and other
incentives to persuade Social network
them to stay.
analytics allow

based on the relationship between words
and/or phrases. It provides a higher level of
refinement than text analytics or natural language processing tools, and exceeds other
traditional methods that involve correcting
typos and errors, removing duplicates and
using Boolean operators such as “and, or, and
no” to limit the search, for example. Semantic analysis goes beyond classifying customer
comments into positive, negative and neutral,
and provides insights into what customers
think about products, including what they like
and what improvements they would like to see.
	

organizations

»	 Identifying influencers: Customers share to identify the
varying degrees of strength of these
relationships
with relationships and
other
individuals
within a group. Social how information
network
analytics flows within groups.
allow organizations to Most important,
identify the strength of
these relationships and these tools enable
how information flows companies to
within groups. Most target group
important, these tools
enable companies to influencers
target group influenc- who can best
ers who can best affect affect members’
members’
decisions.
Influencers can be decisions.
used to quickly bring
a new service or product to market, attract
new customers and prevent mass defection through incentives like special offers.

The latest cloud-based tools for customer feedback analysis support multiple languages at
advanced levels – providing accurate and realtime information about various markets. For
instance, Finnish retailer Kesko uses Etuma’s
text feedback analysis to understand customer
experiences by analyzing numerous surveys
and customer feedback. This has helped the
retailer identify and resolve issues related to
customer dissatisfaction, enhance its ability to
react to problems, and improve product availability and day-to-day operations.7

	 Further, analyzing social media data helps
organizations in the following aspects:
» Customer segmentation: Using customer
demographics and other personal information collected from different sources,
organizations can divide customers into

Quick Take
Applying the LAEI Framework
A leading global pharmaceutical company organizing a fund-raising event wanted to monitor the
Twitter conversations of attendees to understand what they thought about the company. It also wanted
to moderate and display tweets manually, in real time, on a large screen during the conference. We
created a federated Twitter governance tool that captured all conference-related tweets in real time –
allowing multiple moderators to filter and update their feeds and display approved feeds on the screen.
An additional layer for checking regulatory compliance was incorporated during the requirements
analysis phase.
More than 6,000 conversations were monitored and moderated during the conference. The tool
helped identify the top tweets, trending topics and what key opinion leaders were talking about. More
important, it enabled the company to identify key influencers, and understand attendees’ sentiments of
the company. The exercise increased attendees’ engagement levels, as evidenced by their heightened
Twitter activity. It also created a buzz and user-generated content on social channels, which had a positive impact on the brand – resulting in the company raising US$70,000 — a substantial increase over the
US$50,000 it had targeted.

cognizant reports

4
ready to purchase, and direct them to the
nearest stores.
»	 Gain insight into customer spending habits, improve location-based services and
identify locations for real-world marketing
campaigns.

Tools such as Klout8 can be used to gauge
a person’s online influence based on their
responses to social media posts.

•	

Engage: Customers who are engaged with
companies through social media spend 20% to
40% more than other customers, reveals a Bain
& Co. study of more than 3,000 customers.9
Analyzing social media posts provides a deeper
perspective on trending topics, hot brands and
the type of content that is being shared, for
example. This kind of analysis can be used to
drive relevant content posts on channels like
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and blogs, and
propel content shares.

	 Predictive analytics can also be used to understand what would interest customers, and the
ideal time to publish content to “sweeten” content performance. For instance, Adobe Social
predicts engagement levels and proposes the
best time to post content on Facebook in order
to improve content engagement and interaction.

•	

Integrate: This stage involves integrating
unstructured data across the organization
with enterprise structured data to obtain a
360-degree view of customers. To achieve
this, organizations must integrate their social
media platforms with their existing master
data management (MDM) systems. Once a
customer’s social media data flows into the
organization, the MDM hub can search to
determine whether the customer profile
already exists within the enterprise database. If so, it can automatically add relevant
social media data to the master customer file.
It can also update customer profiles whenever
changes are made in source systems to reflect
the latest customer information.

	 Integrating social data with the MDM
hub offers multiple benefits by enabling companies to:
»	 Create digital profiles of customers to
uncover various types of relationships and
influencers.
»	 Provide insights on customer activity
across social channels.
»	 Pull user location data as soon as customers update their location, using the
check-in feature on social media sites.
Sales can use this information to reach
out to customers who are on the move and

cognizant reports

Social Media Command Centers:
The One-Stop Shop
A social media command center collects relevant
conversations in real time, and then analyzes
them to provide insights about customer sentiment, brand performance and the competition,
for example, to inform decisions across various
functional areas within the organization. Companies such as Dell, Cisco and Gatorade have implemented social media command centers primarily
to listen and respond to customer conversations
quickly.10
By combining data visualization tools, social
media platforms and analytics, command centers
allow organizations to monitor relevant online
chatter in real time. This information can be used
to quickly reach out to customers and support
them in suitable ways, thus helping to secure their
loyalty. For instance, T-Mobile uses a social media
command center to prevent customer churn.
Auto companies are employing these centers to
predict recalls. General Electric has a command
center to help the company quickly locate power
outage areas and repair electric grids.11
Real-time monitoring can help adjust content
based on hot topics, make on-the-fly changes
to marketing campaigns and design content to
improve customer engagement, for example. The
latest tools allow companies to add data from
other systems, such as customer relationship
management (CRM), and configure data visualizations for smartphones, PCs and other mobile
devices, apart from large television screens.
Social media command centers have also been
employed by sports organizers and non-profit
organizations. The organizers of the Super Bowl,
for example, launched a social media command
center in 2012 to enhance the experience of the
estimated 150,000 fans who visited the game
site in Indianapolis. In this case, the center provided information about safety and service. The
command center used keyword-based monitoring and geo-targeting of the Indianapolis/Indiana
area across major social media sites12 to identify

5
•	

Marketing: Organizations can no longer rely
on analyzing yesterday’s customer chatter to
devise today’s marketing campaigns. Social
media analytics helps marketers cope with
fast-changing customer preferences through
real-time marketing. By discovering trending
topics, marketers can quickly hone tweets and
social media updates to align with hot topics,
stay relevant and drive customer engagement.
Companies such as Dell and McDonald’s use
social media analytics to listen to customers
in real time and adjust ad campaigns and content on the fly to resonate with social media
users. In fact, based on social media feedback,
Fifth Group Restaurants decided to tone down
one of its Mexican dishes made with chilies,
in spite of an internal debate.14 Marketers can
also use image recognition technologies to see
what images are being shared by customers
and their impact on sales, for example. (See
sidebar, next page).

•	

Sales: Predictive analytics, such as affinity
or market-basket analytics, provides details
about products that are often bought together,
as well as the right combination of products
and services for customers – such as a game
and a movie based on the game. This information can be used for cross-selling and up-selling, and customizing products and services.
Customer sentiment can be used to forecast
sales and revenues, and prepare in advance for
any spikes in demand.

The following are areas where social media analytics can have a big impact:
•	 Innovation: Product development teams can
tap into social media to understand what
customers like or dislike about a brand, the
desired product features
Organizations that a target demographic
can no longer wants, and popular features
of competitors’ products.
rely on analyzing This information can be
yesterday’s used to fix defects in the
customer chatter next iteration, trigger new
ideas, and also review curto devise today’s rent ideas and products in
marketing development. Most crowdcampaigns. sourcing campaigns now use
social media to fuel ideas
and contributions. Feedback on new product
demonstrations can also provide inputs on
customer preferences in various markets.

•	

Customer service: Social media channels can
help companies identify potential customerservice issues before they spiral and inflict
damage to a brand’s reputation. By monitoring social media for real-time feedback during
a new product release, the customer service
team can identify issues and proactively reach
out to customers to fix glitches. Customer service can also forecast what type of problems
customers may encounter during specific
times and prepare accordingly.

•	

Competitive intelligence: In business, nothing can be more valuable than solid competitive intelligence. Social media analytics allows
companies to track competitor mentions on
social media, and understand how competitors
are leveraging various social media platforms
for brand promotion and customer engagement, for example. This information can be

cognizant reports

6

and respond immediately to visitors who posted
on Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms on event-related issues. The command center staff answered attendees’ inquiries about the
event, routes, parking, food, cab service, hotels,
tourist attractions and emergency tips, and provided real-time updates about traffic, weather, etc.
The initiative was a hit, and managed to attract
50,000 fans – 10 times more than expected, and
at a 3.6 to 1 positive to negative sentiment ratio.13
While numerous big brands have built their
own command centers, others are undecided –
fearing the repercussions of huge investments.
Companies can build their own state-of-the-art
command centers by partnering with technology
providers, forming joint ventures, using managed
services or choosing another evolving business
model.

The Case for Advanced Social Analytics
Social media analytics has grown from simply
being a tool for collecting customer likes and comments to an opportunity to gain critical business
insights and make quick and effective decisions.
By augmenting social media analytics with predictive capabilities, organizations can more accurately forecast what their customers are likely to
do. Predictive analytics involves the use of regression models and advanced techniques, such as
neural networks, to provide a complete view of
customers and their future actions based on their
transactional, social-media and other data.
useful for reviewing and strengthening current
social media strategies. Monitoring reviews
and posts by bloggers and thought leaders about competitive products can provide
valuable inputs that can be used to enhance
various functions across the organization.

Embracing Analytics as a Service
Analyzing social media and other enterprise data
is a difficult task. Handling huge volumes of data
poses a significant challenge for organizations
and requires substantial investments in people,
processes, IT tools and infrastructure. Other challenges, such as a lack of domain capabilities and
budgets, disparate databases and organizational
silos can prevent organizations from effectively
using social media data (see Figure 2, next page).
A partner with the ability to handle complex
analytics tasks can help companies take better
advantage of analytics. With process virtualization and cloud computing, opportunities now
exist for cost-cutting through global sourcing via
the Business Process as a Service (BPaaS)15 delivery model. This can save precious capital expenditures (Cap-Ex) – estimated by some industry
sources at up to 30% – by eliminating the cost of

acquiring expensive hardware, software and key
talent through outcomes-based and consumption
pricing models.
A subset of BPaaS, analytics as a service (AaaS)
combines traditional knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) and business process outsourcing (BPO) capabilities with more efficient, cloudenabled ways of delivering analytical insights.
This approach allows organizations to deploy
analytics solutions tailored to their needs. The
service can be increased or decreased as business requirements dictate, providing more flexibility in controlling operating expenses.
Organizations should seek a partner that can
seamlessly marry analytics with technology,
rather than a pure-play analytics services provider that lacks industry-specific domain expertise. The key analytical component is derived from
the ability to understand various business-use
cases and develop predictive models capable of
comprehending complex relationships and learning from historical data. A qualified partner must
have expertise in extracting meaningful insights
from social networks and social media and performing complex analyses on the data. Such a

Quick Take
Image Recognition Analytics
Social networking sites such as Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and Flickr receive and host billions of
photos, with thousands added every minute. Some of the images can be of brands, company logos and
products, without any text to reference them. Since traditional social media monitoring tools can only
track text (such as user comments and posts mentioning a brand), marketers often do not know what
customers are referring to, who is using their company’s products, or if counterfeit versions of those
products exist.
Analytics with image recognition capabilities can help companies overcome this challenge and leverage images to enhance their market knowledge and extend their reach. Advanced image analytics with
pixel-level analysis is gradually gaining acceptance among large retailers and advertising agencies.
Companies such as Piqora and Curalate have developed image recognition technologies for social
media sites such as Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram – allowing them to identify the most popular
shared images from their Web sites, the most influential individual visitors, and the traffic that an image
diverts to a target Web site, for example.
A case in point: A coffee shop chain can use this technology to gather information about what its
customers like and dislike; confirm the most popular shops in the chain; the number of times an image
is shared and by how many people; its impact on sales; location-based knowledge and competitor information. The coffee chain can reach out to more customers, respond to user comments, engage with
influencers and other prospective customers, and use images with positive comments for marketing
after obtaining permission.

cognizant reports

7
Barriers to Using Social Media Data Effectively
Nothing is Preventing
Lack of Awareness About Opportunities
General Lack of Engagement with Social Media
Organizational Silos/Lack of Joined-up Thinking
Lack of Resources to Make Sense of Data
No Budget/Lack of Buy-in from
Top of Organization
Social Analytics are Separate from Multichannel
Analytics and Business Intelligence
Social Data Stored in Disparate Tools
Lack of Tracking Capabilities and Analytics
0%

10%

Companies

20%

30%

40%

50%

Agencies

n = more than 650 marketing professionals from companies and agencies across North America and Europe.

Source: Econsultancy and Adobe, September 5, 2012
Figure 2

partner must also be able to integrate advanced
analytics with enterprise systems, and enhance
business efficiencies.
As analytics processes become standardized
and can uniformly be applied via cloud-enabled
models (harnessing the growing clout of utility
computing architectures), we believe that organizations stand to benefit greatly by associating
themselves with partners that have invested in
such capabilities.

Looking Forward
To experience the full potential of analytics,
we advise companies to consider the following:
•	 Identify key areas for deploying analytics.
•	 Enter into relationships with partners capable
of providing AaaS.
•	 Design a comprehensive strategy for the adoption and implementation of analytics.
•	 Develop an enterprise-wide data architecture.
•	 Formulate customized strategies to capitalize
on unique data.
•	 Develop a fact-based decision-making culture
focused on achieving specific goals.
•	 Continuously refurbish and renew the organization’s analytics implementation.

Footnotes
1

	“Social Networking Reaches Nearly One in Four Around the World.” eMarketer, June 18, 2013.
http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Social-Networking-Reaches-Nearly-One-Four-AroundWorld/1009976
	“Experian Marketing Services Reveals 27 Percent Of Time Spent Online Is On Social Networking
In 2012.” Prnewswire, April 16, 2012. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/experian-marketingservices-reveals-27-percent-of-time-spent-online-is-on-social-networking-in-2012-203209121.html

2

	 “Global Consumers’ Trust In Earned Advertising Grows In Importance.” Nielsen, April 10, 2012. http://
www.nielsen.com/us/en/press-room/2012/nielsen-global-consumers-trust-in-earned-advertisinggrows.html

3

4

	“Big Content: The Unstructured Side of Big Data.” Gartner, May 1, 2013. http://blogs.gartner.com/
darin-stewart/2013/05/01/big-content-the-unstructured-side-of-big-data/

cognizant reports

8
“Data-Rich and Insight-Poor: Marketers Planning to Turn Information into Intelligence in 2013.”
Infogroup.com, 2013. http://lp.infogroup.com/Global/FileLib/Infogroup_Targeting_Solutions/DataRich_and_Insight-Poor_Survey_Findings_from_ITS_and_Yesmail.pdf

5

	“Socially Devoted: The Next Generation of Customer Care is Social.” Social Bakers, July, 2013.
http://www.tnooz.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/soc-dev-q2-infographic1.png

6

	“Retail Case Kesko: The Evolution of Kesko’s Customer Experience Using Etuma’s Free-form Text
Feedback Analysis Services.” Etuma, July 6, 2013. http://www.etuma.com/evolution-of-kesko-customer-experience-using-etuma-feedback-analysis/#more-1509

7

	 Klout allows users to measure their online influence. It currently tracks user activity around seven
social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., and assigns a Klout Score, a number
between 1and 100. Higher Klout Score represents greater influence.

8

	“Putting Social Media to Work.” Bain & Company, 2011. http://www.bain.com/Images/BAIN_BRIEF_
Putting_social_media_to_work.pdf

9

	
“Examples of Social Media Command Centers for the World’s Largest Brands.” Salesforce Blog,
December 5, 2012. http://blogs.salesforce.com/company/2012/12/examples-of-social-media-commandcenters-for-the-worlds-largest-brands.html

10

	“Social Media Command Centers Built For Brands Not NASA.” Intelligent HQ, May 6, 2013. http://
www.intelligenthq.com/social-media-business/social-media-command-center/

11

	“Super Bowl First: Social Media Command Center.” Today, January 23, 2012. http://www.today.com/
tech/super-bowl-first-social-media-command-center-84788

12

	“Learning From a Super Bowl’s Social Media Command Center.” Social Media Today, February 1, 2013.
http://socialmediatoday.com/adam-chapman/1205706/learning-super-bowls-social-media-commandcenter

13

	
“Social Media Isn’t All Marketing.” Monkeydish, June 17, 2013. http://www.monkeydish.com/ideas/
articles/social-media-isn%E2%80%99t-all-marketing

14

	
BPaaS refers to the provision of business services encompassing underlying IT infrastructure,
platform and skilled manpower, to run specific business processes within a virtual, globalized and
distributed operating model.

15

Bibliography

•	 “Customer Analytics in the Age of Social Media.” TDWI Research, 2012. http://tdwi.org/research/
2012/07/best-practices-report-q3-customer-analytics-in-the-age-of-social-media/asset.aspx

•	 “Who’s Sharing My Brand Images? Why Text-Based Social Media Monitoring Falls Short.” Adota,

May 16, 2013. http://www.adotas.com/2013/05/who%E2%80%99s-sharing-my-brand-imageswhy-text-based-social-media-monitoring-falls-short/

•	 “The Social Economy: Unlocking Value and Productivity through Social Technologies.” McKinsey &
Company, July, 2012. http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet/the_social_
economy

•	

“Adobe Social Unveils Predictive Publishing for Facebook.” BusinessWire, April 24, 2013. http://www.
businesswire.com/news/home/20130423006871/en/Adobe-Social-Unveils-Predictive-PublishingFacebook

•	 “Social Media Analytics Software Pulls Useful Info Out Of Online Muddle.” SearchBusinessAnalytics,
2013. http://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/feature/Social-media-analytics-software-pullsuseful-info-out-of-online-muddle

cognizant reports

9
Credits
Author and Research Analyst
Vinaya Kumar Mylavarapu, Cognizant Research Center

Subject Matter Expert
Amit Shah, Manager, Cognizant Social

Design
Harleen Bhatia, Design Team Lead
Suresh Satyavarapu, Designer

About Cognizant
Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH) is a leading provider of information technology, consulting, and business process
outsourcing services, dedicated to helping the world’s leading companies build stronger businesses. Headquartered
in Teaneck, New Jersey (U.S.), Cognizant combines a passion for client satisfaction, technology innovation, deep
industry and business process expertise, and a global, collaborative workforce that embodies the future of work.
With over 50 delivery centers worldwide and approximately 164,300 employees as of June 30, 2013, Cognizant is a
member of the NASDAQ-100, the S&P 500, the Forbes Global 2000, and the Fortune 500, and is ranked among the
top performing and fastest growing companies in the world.
Visit us online at www.cognizant.com for more information.

World Headquarters

European Headquarters

India Operations Headquarters

500 Frank W. Burr Blvd.
Teaneck, NJ 07666 USA
Phone: +1 201 801 0233
Fax: +1 201 801 0243
Toll Free: +1 888 937 3277
Email: inquiry@cognizant.com

1 Kingdom Street
Paddington Central
London W2 6BD
Phone: +44 (0) 207 297 7600
Fax: +44 (0) 207 121 0102
Email: infouk@cognizant.com

#5/535, Old Mahabalipuram Road
Okkiyam Pettai, Thoraipakkam
Chennai, 600 096 India
Phone: +91 (0) 44 4209 6000
Fax: +91 (0) 44 4209 6060
Email: inquiryindia@cognizant.com

©
­­ Copyright 2013, Cognizant. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the express written permission from Cognizant. The information contained herein is
subject to change without notice. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.

More Related Content

More from Cognizant

It Takes an Ecosystem: How Technology Companies Deliver Exceptional Experiences
It Takes an Ecosystem: How Technology Companies Deliver Exceptional ExperiencesIt Takes an Ecosystem: How Technology Companies Deliver Exceptional Experiences
It Takes an Ecosystem: How Technology Companies Deliver Exceptional ExperiencesCognizant
 
Intuition Engineered
Intuition EngineeredIntuition Engineered
Intuition EngineeredCognizant
 
The Work Ahead: Transportation and Logistics Delivering on the Digital-Physic...
The Work Ahead: Transportation and Logistics Delivering on the Digital-Physic...The Work Ahead: Transportation and Logistics Delivering on the Digital-Physic...
The Work Ahead: Transportation and Logistics Delivering on the Digital-Physic...Cognizant
 
Enhancing Desirability: Five Considerations for Winning Digital Initiatives
Enhancing Desirability: Five Considerations for Winning Digital InitiativesEnhancing Desirability: Five Considerations for Winning Digital Initiatives
Enhancing Desirability: Five Considerations for Winning Digital InitiativesCognizant
 
The Work Ahead in Manufacturing: Fulfilling the Agility Mandate
The Work Ahead in Manufacturing: Fulfilling the Agility MandateThe Work Ahead in Manufacturing: Fulfilling the Agility Mandate
The Work Ahead in Manufacturing: Fulfilling the Agility MandateCognizant
 
The Work Ahead in Higher Education: Repaving the Road for the Employees of To...
The Work Ahead in Higher Education: Repaving the Road for the Employees of To...The Work Ahead in Higher Education: Repaving the Road for the Employees of To...
The Work Ahead in Higher Education: Repaving the Road for the Employees of To...Cognizant
 
Engineering the Next-Gen Digital Claims Organisation for Australian General I...
Engineering the Next-Gen Digital Claims Organisation for Australian General I...Engineering the Next-Gen Digital Claims Organisation for Australian General I...
Engineering the Next-Gen Digital Claims Organisation for Australian General I...Cognizant
 
Profitability in the Direct-to-Consumer Marketplace: A Playbook for Media and...
Profitability in the Direct-to-Consumer Marketplace: A Playbook for Media and...Profitability in the Direct-to-Consumer Marketplace: A Playbook for Media and...
Profitability in the Direct-to-Consumer Marketplace: A Playbook for Media and...Cognizant
 
Green Rush: The Economic Imperative for Sustainability
Green Rush: The Economic Imperative for SustainabilityGreen Rush: The Economic Imperative for Sustainability
Green Rush: The Economic Imperative for SustainabilityCognizant
 
Policy Administration Modernization: Four Paths for Insurers
Policy Administration Modernization: Four Paths for InsurersPolicy Administration Modernization: Four Paths for Insurers
Policy Administration Modernization: Four Paths for InsurersCognizant
 
The Work Ahead in Utilities: Powering a Sustainable Future with Digital
The Work Ahead in Utilities: Powering a Sustainable Future with DigitalThe Work Ahead in Utilities: Powering a Sustainable Future with Digital
The Work Ahead in Utilities: Powering a Sustainable Future with DigitalCognizant
 
AI in Media & Entertainment: Starting the Journey to Value
AI in Media & Entertainment: Starting the Journey to ValueAI in Media & Entertainment: Starting the Journey to Value
AI in Media & Entertainment: Starting the Journey to ValueCognizant
 
Operations Workforce Management: A Data-Informed, Digital-First Approach
Operations Workforce Management: A Data-Informed, Digital-First ApproachOperations Workforce Management: A Data-Informed, Digital-First Approach
Operations Workforce Management: A Data-Informed, Digital-First ApproachCognizant
 
Five Priorities for Quality Engineering When Taking Banking to the Cloud
Five Priorities for Quality Engineering When Taking Banking to the CloudFive Priorities for Quality Engineering When Taking Banking to the Cloud
Five Priorities for Quality Engineering When Taking Banking to the CloudCognizant
 
Getting Ahead With AI: How APAC Companies Replicate Success by Remaining Focused
Getting Ahead With AI: How APAC Companies Replicate Success by Remaining FocusedGetting Ahead With AI: How APAC Companies Replicate Success by Remaining Focused
Getting Ahead With AI: How APAC Companies Replicate Success by Remaining FocusedCognizant
 
Crafting the Utility of the Future
Crafting the Utility of the FutureCrafting the Utility of the Future
Crafting the Utility of the FutureCognizant
 
Utilities Can Ramp Up CX with a Customer Data Platform
Utilities Can Ramp Up CX with a Customer Data PlatformUtilities Can Ramp Up CX with a Customer Data Platform
Utilities Can Ramp Up CX with a Customer Data PlatformCognizant
 
The Work Ahead in Intelligent Automation: Coping with Complexity in a Post-Pa...
The Work Ahead in Intelligent Automation: Coping with Complexity in a Post-Pa...The Work Ahead in Intelligent Automation: Coping with Complexity in a Post-Pa...
The Work Ahead in Intelligent Automation: Coping with Complexity in a Post-Pa...Cognizant
 
The Timeline of Next
The Timeline of NextThe Timeline of Next
The Timeline of NextCognizant
 
Realising Digital’s Full Potential in the Value Chain
Realising Digital’s Full Potential in the Value ChainRealising Digital’s Full Potential in the Value Chain
Realising Digital’s Full Potential in the Value ChainCognizant
 

More from Cognizant (20)

It Takes an Ecosystem: How Technology Companies Deliver Exceptional Experiences
It Takes an Ecosystem: How Technology Companies Deliver Exceptional ExperiencesIt Takes an Ecosystem: How Technology Companies Deliver Exceptional Experiences
It Takes an Ecosystem: How Technology Companies Deliver Exceptional Experiences
 
Intuition Engineered
Intuition EngineeredIntuition Engineered
Intuition Engineered
 
The Work Ahead: Transportation and Logistics Delivering on the Digital-Physic...
The Work Ahead: Transportation and Logistics Delivering on the Digital-Physic...The Work Ahead: Transportation and Logistics Delivering on the Digital-Physic...
The Work Ahead: Transportation and Logistics Delivering on the Digital-Physic...
 
Enhancing Desirability: Five Considerations for Winning Digital Initiatives
Enhancing Desirability: Five Considerations for Winning Digital InitiativesEnhancing Desirability: Five Considerations for Winning Digital Initiatives
Enhancing Desirability: Five Considerations for Winning Digital Initiatives
 
The Work Ahead in Manufacturing: Fulfilling the Agility Mandate
The Work Ahead in Manufacturing: Fulfilling the Agility MandateThe Work Ahead in Manufacturing: Fulfilling the Agility Mandate
The Work Ahead in Manufacturing: Fulfilling the Agility Mandate
 
The Work Ahead in Higher Education: Repaving the Road for the Employees of To...
The Work Ahead in Higher Education: Repaving the Road for the Employees of To...The Work Ahead in Higher Education: Repaving the Road for the Employees of To...
The Work Ahead in Higher Education: Repaving the Road for the Employees of To...
 
Engineering the Next-Gen Digital Claims Organisation for Australian General I...
Engineering the Next-Gen Digital Claims Organisation for Australian General I...Engineering the Next-Gen Digital Claims Organisation for Australian General I...
Engineering the Next-Gen Digital Claims Organisation for Australian General I...
 
Profitability in the Direct-to-Consumer Marketplace: A Playbook for Media and...
Profitability in the Direct-to-Consumer Marketplace: A Playbook for Media and...Profitability in the Direct-to-Consumer Marketplace: A Playbook for Media and...
Profitability in the Direct-to-Consumer Marketplace: A Playbook for Media and...
 
Green Rush: The Economic Imperative for Sustainability
Green Rush: The Economic Imperative for SustainabilityGreen Rush: The Economic Imperative for Sustainability
Green Rush: The Economic Imperative for Sustainability
 
Policy Administration Modernization: Four Paths for Insurers
Policy Administration Modernization: Four Paths for InsurersPolicy Administration Modernization: Four Paths for Insurers
Policy Administration Modernization: Four Paths for Insurers
 
The Work Ahead in Utilities: Powering a Sustainable Future with Digital
The Work Ahead in Utilities: Powering a Sustainable Future with DigitalThe Work Ahead in Utilities: Powering a Sustainable Future with Digital
The Work Ahead in Utilities: Powering a Sustainable Future with Digital
 
AI in Media & Entertainment: Starting the Journey to Value
AI in Media & Entertainment: Starting the Journey to ValueAI in Media & Entertainment: Starting the Journey to Value
AI in Media & Entertainment: Starting the Journey to Value
 
Operations Workforce Management: A Data-Informed, Digital-First Approach
Operations Workforce Management: A Data-Informed, Digital-First ApproachOperations Workforce Management: A Data-Informed, Digital-First Approach
Operations Workforce Management: A Data-Informed, Digital-First Approach
 
Five Priorities for Quality Engineering When Taking Banking to the Cloud
Five Priorities for Quality Engineering When Taking Banking to the CloudFive Priorities for Quality Engineering When Taking Banking to the Cloud
Five Priorities for Quality Engineering When Taking Banking to the Cloud
 
Getting Ahead With AI: How APAC Companies Replicate Success by Remaining Focused
Getting Ahead With AI: How APAC Companies Replicate Success by Remaining FocusedGetting Ahead With AI: How APAC Companies Replicate Success by Remaining Focused
Getting Ahead With AI: How APAC Companies Replicate Success by Remaining Focused
 
Crafting the Utility of the Future
Crafting the Utility of the FutureCrafting the Utility of the Future
Crafting the Utility of the Future
 
Utilities Can Ramp Up CX with a Customer Data Platform
Utilities Can Ramp Up CX with a Customer Data PlatformUtilities Can Ramp Up CX with a Customer Data Platform
Utilities Can Ramp Up CX with a Customer Data Platform
 
The Work Ahead in Intelligent Automation: Coping with Complexity in a Post-Pa...
The Work Ahead in Intelligent Automation: Coping with Complexity in a Post-Pa...The Work Ahead in Intelligent Automation: Coping with Complexity in a Post-Pa...
The Work Ahead in Intelligent Automation: Coping with Complexity in a Post-Pa...
 
The Timeline of Next
The Timeline of NextThe Timeline of Next
The Timeline of Next
 
Realising Digital’s Full Potential in the Value Chain
Realising Digital’s Full Potential in the Value ChainRealising Digital’s Full Potential in the Value Chain
Realising Digital’s Full Potential in the Value Chain
 

Recently uploaded

Cybersecurity Workshop #1.pptx
Cybersecurity Workshop #1.pptxCybersecurity Workshop #1.pptx
Cybersecurity Workshop #1.pptxGDSC PJATK
 
9 Steps For Building Winning Founding Team
9 Steps For Building Winning Founding Team9 Steps For Building Winning Founding Team
9 Steps For Building Winning Founding TeamAdam Moalla
 
Basic Building Blocks of Internet of Things.
Basic Building Blocks of Internet of Things.Basic Building Blocks of Internet of Things.
Basic Building Blocks of Internet of Things.YounusS2
 
COMPUTER 10: Lesson 7 - File Storage and Online Collaboration
COMPUTER 10: Lesson 7 - File Storage and Online CollaborationCOMPUTER 10: Lesson 7 - File Storage and Online Collaboration
COMPUTER 10: Lesson 7 - File Storage and Online Collaborationbruanjhuli
 
UiPath Solutions Management Preview - Northern CA Chapter - March 22.pdf
UiPath Solutions Management Preview - Northern CA Chapter - March 22.pdfUiPath Solutions Management Preview - Northern CA Chapter - March 22.pdf
UiPath Solutions Management Preview - Northern CA Chapter - March 22.pdfDianaGray10
 
NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 Workshop
NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 WorkshopNIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 Workshop
NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 WorkshopBachir Benyammi
 
VoIP Service and Marketing using Odoo and Asterisk PBX
VoIP Service and Marketing using Odoo and Asterisk PBXVoIP Service and Marketing using Odoo and Asterisk PBX
VoIP Service and Marketing using Odoo and Asterisk PBXTarek Kalaji
 
IESVE Software for Florida Code Compliance Using ASHRAE 90.1-2019
IESVE Software for Florida Code Compliance Using ASHRAE 90.1-2019IESVE Software for Florida Code Compliance Using ASHRAE 90.1-2019
IESVE Software for Florida Code Compliance Using ASHRAE 90.1-2019IES VE
 
Apres-Cyber - The Data Dilemma: Bridging Offensive Operations and Machine Lea...
Apres-Cyber - The Data Dilemma: Bridging Offensive Operations and Machine Lea...Apres-Cyber - The Data Dilemma: Bridging Offensive Operations and Machine Lea...
Apres-Cyber - The Data Dilemma: Bridging Offensive Operations and Machine Lea...Will Schroeder
 
UiPath Studio Web workshop series - Day 6
UiPath Studio Web workshop series - Day 6UiPath Studio Web workshop series - Day 6
UiPath Studio Web workshop series - Day 6DianaGray10
 
UiPath Studio Web workshop series - Day 7
UiPath Studio Web workshop series - Day 7UiPath Studio Web workshop series - Day 7
UiPath Studio Web workshop series - Day 7DianaGray10
 
Comparing Sidecar-less Service Mesh from Cilium and Istio
Comparing Sidecar-less Service Mesh from Cilium and IstioComparing Sidecar-less Service Mesh from Cilium and Istio
Comparing Sidecar-less Service Mesh from Cilium and IstioChristian Posta
 
Secure your environment with UiPath and CyberArk technologies - Session 1
Secure your environment with UiPath and CyberArk technologies - Session 1Secure your environment with UiPath and CyberArk technologies - Session 1
Secure your environment with UiPath and CyberArk technologies - Session 1DianaGray10
 
Artificial Intelligence & SEO Trends for 2024
Artificial Intelligence & SEO Trends for 2024Artificial Intelligence & SEO Trends for 2024
Artificial Intelligence & SEO Trends for 2024D Cloud Solutions
 
Crea il tuo assistente AI con lo Stregatto (open source python framework)
Crea il tuo assistente AI con lo Stregatto (open source python framework)Crea il tuo assistente AI con lo Stregatto (open source python framework)
Crea il tuo assistente AI con lo Stregatto (open source python framework)Commit University
 
Nanopower In Semiconductor Industry.pdf
Nanopower  In Semiconductor Industry.pdfNanopower  In Semiconductor Industry.pdf
Nanopower In Semiconductor Industry.pdfPedro Manuel
 
Anypoint Code Builder , Google Pub sub connector and MuleSoft RPA
Anypoint Code Builder , Google Pub sub connector and MuleSoft RPAAnypoint Code Builder , Google Pub sub connector and MuleSoft RPA
Anypoint Code Builder , Google Pub sub connector and MuleSoft RPAshyamraj55
 
ADOPTING WEB 3 FOR YOUR BUSINESS: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE
ADOPTING WEB 3 FOR YOUR BUSINESS: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDEADOPTING WEB 3 FOR YOUR BUSINESS: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE
ADOPTING WEB 3 FOR YOUR BUSINESS: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDELiveplex
 
UWB Technology for Enhanced Indoor and Outdoor Positioning in Physiological M...
UWB Technology for Enhanced Indoor and Outdoor Positioning in Physiological M...UWB Technology for Enhanced Indoor and Outdoor Positioning in Physiological M...
UWB Technology for Enhanced Indoor and Outdoor Positioning in Physiological M...UbiTrack UK
 

Recently uploaded (20)

Cybersecurity Workshop #1.pptx
Cybersecurity Workshop #1.pptxCybersecurity Workshop #1.pptx
Cybersecurity Workshop #1.pptx
 
9 Steps For Building Winning Founding Team
9 Steps For Building Winning Founding Team9 Steps For Building Winning Founding Team
9 Steps For Building Winning Founding Team
 
20230104 - machine vision
20230104 - machine vision20230104 - machine vision
20230104 - machine vision
 
Basic Building Blocks of Internet of Things.
Basic Building Blocks of Internet of Things.Basic Building Blocks of Internet of Things.
Basic Building Blocks of Internet of Things.
 
COMPUTER 10: Lesson 7 - File Storage and Online Collaboration
COMPUTER 10: Lesson 7 - File Storage and Online CollaborationCOMPUTER 10: Lesson 7 - File Storage and Online Collaboration
COMPUTER 10: Lesson 7 - File Storage and Online Collaboration
 
UiPath Solutions Management Preview - Northern CA Chapter - March 22.pdf
UiPath Solutions Management Preview - Northern CA Chapter - March 22.pdfUiPath Solutions Management Preview - Northern CA Chapter - March 22.pdf
UiPath Solutions Management Preview - Northern CA Chapter - March 22.pdf
 
NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 Workshop
NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 WorkshopNIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 Workshop
NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 Workshop
 
VoIP Service and Marketing using Odoo and Asterisk PBX
VoIP Service and Marketing using Odoo and Asterisk PBXVoIP Service and Marketing using Odoo and Asterisk PBX
VoIP Service and Marketing using Odoo and Asterisk PBX
 
IESVE Software for Florida Code Compliance Using ASHRAE 90.1-2019
IESVE Software for Florida Code Compliance Using ASHRAE 90.1-2019IESVE Software for Florida Code Compliance Using ASHRAE 90.1-2019
IESVE Software for Florida Code Compliance Using ASHRAE 90.1-2019
 
Apres-Cyber - The Data Dilemma: Bridging Offensive Operations and Machine Lea...
Apres-Cyber - The Data Dilemma: Bridging Offensive Operations and Machine Lea...Apres-Cyber - The Data Dilemma: Bridging Offensive Operations and Machine Lea...
Apres-Cyber - The Data Dilemma: Bridging Offensive Operations and Machine Lea...
 
UiPath Studio Web workshop series - Day 6
UiPath Studio Web workshop series - Day 6UiPath Studio Web workshop series - Day 6
UiPath Studio Web workshop series - Day 6
 
UiPath Studio Web workshop series - Day 7
UiPath Studio Web workshop series - Day 7UiPath Studio Web workshop series - Day 7
UiPath Studio Web workshop series - Day 7
 
Comparing Sidecar-less Service Mesh from Cilium and Istio
Comparing Sidecar-less Service Mesh from Cilium and IstioComparing Sidecar-less Service Mesh from Cilium and Istio
Comparing Sidecar-less Service Mesh from Cilium and Istio
 
Secure your environment with UiPath and CyberArk technologies - Session 1
Secure your environment with UiPath and CyberArk technologies - Session 1Secure your environment with UiPath and CyberArk technologies - Session 1
Secure your environment with UiPath and CyberArk technologies - Session 1
 
Artificial Intelligence & SEO Trends for 2024
Artificial Intelligence & SEO Trends for 2024Artificial Intelligence & SEO Trends for 2024
Artificial Intelligence & SEO Trends for 2024
 
Crea il tuo assistente AI con lo Stregatto (open source python framework)
Crea il tuo assistente AI con lo Stregatto (open source python framework)Crea il tuo assistente AI con lo Stregatto (open source python framework)
Crea il tuo assistente AI con lo Stregatto (open source python framework)
 
Nanopower In Semiconductor Industry.pdf
Nanopower  In Semiconductor Industry.pdfNanopower  In Semiconductor Industry.pdf
Nanopower In Semiconductor Industry.pdf
 
Anypoint Code Builder , Google Pub sub connector and MuleSoft RPA
Anypoint Code Builder , Google Pub sub connector and MuleSoft RPAAnypoint Code Builder , Google Pub sub connector and MuleSoft RPA
Anypoint Code Builder , Google Pub sub connector and MuleSoft RPA
 
ADOPTING WEB 3 FOR YOUR BUSINESS: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE
ADOPTING WEB 3 FOR YOUR BUSINESS: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDEADOPTING WEB 3 FOR YOUR BUSINESS: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE
ADOPTING WEB 3 FOR YOUR BUSINESS: A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE
 
UWB Technology for Enhanced Indoor and Outdoor Positioning in Physiological M...
UWB Technology for Enhanced Indoor and Outdoor Positioning in Physiological M...UWB Technology for Enhanced Indoor and Outdoor Positioning in Physiological M...
UWB Technology for Enhanced Indoor and Outdoor Positioning in Physiological M...
 

Social Media Analytics: Enabling Intelligent, Real-Time Decision Making

  • 1. • Cognizant Reports Social Media Analytics: Enabling Intelligent, Real-Time Decision Making Today, an increasing number of organizations rely on social media for interacting internally, as well as with external constituents. Using advanced and predictive analytics applied holistically via a centralized “command center,” companies can mine growing pools of unstructured data, deliver more timely and actionable insights, and better inform business and operational strategies. cognizant reports | August 2013
  • 2. Executive Summary With more than 1.5 billion users worldwide,1 social media offers a treasure trove of information in the form of real-time, interactive communications made available through blogs, tweets, updates, images and videos. Not surprisingly, organizations are growing more and more reliant on social media to understand and work more responsively with employees, vendors and customers, and better gauge the competition. However, mining and analyzing the huge volumes of unstructured data generated by social media is no easy task. Using social media analytics, organizations can mine and decipher vast amounts of data from various social media platforms to discover customer sentiment about brands, trends, the issues customers face, the efficacy of marketing campaigns and competitor intelligence, for example. Findings can be used by sales, marketing and other functions to support more informed and timely decisions. By adding predictive analytics, organizations can more accurately forecast customer needs and behaviors, and anticipate and deal with issues before they can damage the business’s reputation. Yet achieving this level of knowledge can be a real challenge. We have developed a framework, LAEI, that allows companies to be successful in their social media initiatives. The first step for any organization is to listen to conversations. This could be active listening using certain tools and a dedicated team for owned and earned media, or passive listening during a time of crisis. Listening helps in collecting all the data, and using the power of technology and human interactionsto analyze that data for business insights. The next step in the journey is the most critical, and one where we see most customers experience a disconnect. Once you have insights, it is important to use them as part of your engagement strategy. This could be as simple as responding back to one-on-one conversations for customer service or as complex as using the insights to drive content strategy for marketing. The last step is to integrate the social data and combine it with enterprise data to obtain the digital profile of your customer. Organizations with limited capabilities and budgets can pursue analytics as a service (AaaS), an emerging service delivery model that provides access to third-party specialists that can cognizant reports offer analytical insights – dynamically shifting the cost of owning the technology infrastructure, processes and talent from the organization to an expert partner. Driving Forces The Rise of Social Media According to an Experian Marketing Services study,2 U.S. consumers spend 27% of their total Internet time on social networking sites and forums. Facebook has more than 1.1 billion active users. Twitter, on average, records 58 million tweets every day. These statistics, combined with the millions of blog posts on the Internet and discussions that occur by the minute on forums and social networking sites, for example, can provide a rich and growing pool of data on market trends and such things as consumer interests and perceptions. Still, data is one thing; analyzing it successfully to gain useful insights is quite another. The Growth of User-Generated Content Many consumers enthusiastically post their experiences with brands and write product reviews on various social media platforms like wikis, blogs and social networking sites. Such user-generated content (UGC) is perceived by pundits to carry more value and make brands more trustworthy than any company advertisement. According to a 2012 Nielsen survey of 28,000 global Internet users, 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family more than any other form of advertising. Seventy percent of customers place their trust in online consumer reviews – making this medium the second most trusted form of advertising.3 Marketers, too, are encouraging users to comment, submit pictures and videos, rate products and write reviews. However, user-generated content is mostly informal, and analyzing it can be difficult – especially when trying to ascertain the rationale underlying certain comments and ratings, what customer posts mean, and the significance of the type of medium used, for example. The Challenge of Unstructured Data According to Gartner, 80% of enterprise data – documents, e-mails, call logs, corporate blogs and the like – is unstructured (i.e., it does not fit into any traditional database).4 The proliferating use of social media data (including tweets and comments in colloquial style, images, videos, 2
  • 3. blog posts, etc.) is exponentially increasing the amount of unstructured data to be sorted, analyzed and used to gain meaningful insights. Yet most organizations do not have the resources or tools needed to sift through and interpret the vast quantities of social media data they have at their disposal without making considerable changes to their IT infrastructure, operational processes and organizational structure. brand mention, customer feedback and discussions, for example. The scope of data collection depends on the business purpose, such as gauging the market’s perception of a new product, monitoring marketing campaigns, creating brand awareness and performing competitor intelligence. Data-gathering tools (free or subscription-based) can help organizations collect customers’ tweets, blog posts, status updates, etc., in real time from various social media sites, based on pre-set search parameters. This allows companies to track and respond to individual customer updates and tweets as soon as they are received. For example, from Q2 2012 to Q2 2013, brands improved their response rates on Facebook by 143%, according to a survey by Social Bakers. The airlines industry led in social customer care by answering 79% of customer questions, closely followed by finance (78%) and telecom (75%). Dutch airline KLM is the most socially devoted brand – answering 98% of questions on Facebook at an average response time of 45 minutes.6 While the “digerati” seem to agree that social media data presents significant opportunities, few organizations appear to have the strategies, skills and tools in place to analyze the data. In fact, analyzing and applying data of all types and formats are the biggest data-related challenges in 2013 for 45% of the 700 marketers surveyed by Infogroup Targeting Solutions and Yesmail Interactive (see Figure 1).5 Advanced social analytics can help organizations analyze and quickly draw inferences from burgeoning unstructured social media and enterprise data, and convert it into actionable insights. Harnessing Social Media Data Using the LAEI Framework In our view, organizations need a holistic strategy for exploiting social media’s full potential. We recommend that companies build a social media analytics framework around four critical steps – listen, analyze, engage and integrate – to effectively use social media for intelligent decision making (see sidebar, next page). • Listen: The first step involves identifying and collecting relevant social media data around • Analyze: The next step involves analyzing the collected data to understand customer sentiment. However, the data will contain plenty of irrelevant information – especially if organizations use social media crawlers to find comments with brand mention. This makes it difficult to pin down what customers are actually saying. Removing the “noise” around the data will help improve the accuracy of the analysis. Semantic analysis is an advanced data-cleansing method that groups large amounts of data Data Challenges in 2013 Hiring Qualified Employees 8% Real-time Data Collection 11% Collecting Data 11% Protecting Customer Data and Privacy 12% Cleaning Data 13% 20% Applying Data Analyzing Data 25% Source: Infogroup Targeting Solutions and Yesmail Interactive, 2013 Figure 1 cognizant reports 3
  • 4. segments based on their behavioral patterns. Segmentation helps shed light on issues specific to each group, and address group patterns as a whole. It can be used to design marketing campaigns for each target segment. For instance, marketers can offer high-value customers greater discounts and other incentives to persuade Social network them to stay. analytics allow based on the relationship between words and/or phrases. It provides a higher level of refinement than text analytics or natural language processing tools, and exceeds other traditional methods that involve correcting typos and errors, removing duplicates and using Boolean operators such as “and, or, and no” to limit the search, for example. Semantic analysis goes beyond classifying customer comments into positive, negative and neutral, and provides insights into what customers think about products, including what they like and what improvements they would like to see. organizations » Identifying influencers: Customers share to identify the varying degrees of strength of these relationships with relationships and other individuals within a group. Social how information network analytics flows within groups. allow organizations to Most important, identify the strength of these relationships and these tools enable how information flows companies to within groups. Most target group important, these tools enable companies to influencers target group influenc- who can best ers who can best affect affect members’ members’ decisions. Influencers can be decisions. used to quickly bring a new service or product to market, attract new customers and prevent mass defection through incentives like special offers. The latest cloud-based tools for customer feedback analysis support multiple languages at advanced levels – providing accurate and realtime information about various markets. For instance, Finnish retailer Kesko uses Etuma’s text feedback analysis to understand customer experiences by analyzing numerous surveys and customer feedback. This has helped the retailer identify and resolve issues related to customer dissatisfaction, enhance its ability to react to problems, and improve product availability and day-to-day operations.7 Further, analyzing social media data helps organizations in the following aspects: » Customer segmentation: Using customer demographics and other personal information collected from different sources, organizations can divide customers into Quick Take Applying the LAEI Framework A leading global pharmaceutical company organizing a fund-raising event wanted to monitor the Twitter conversations of attendees to understand what they thought about the company. It also wanted to moderate and display tweets manually, in real time, on a large screen during the conference. We created a federated Twitter governance tool that captured all conference-related tweets in real time – allowing multiple moderators to filter and update their feeds and display approved feeds on the screen. An additional layer for checking regulatory compliance was incorporated during the requirements analysis phase. More than 6,000 conversations were monitored and moderated during the conference. The tool helped identify the top tweets, trending topics and what key opinion leaders were talking about. More important, it enabled the company to identify key influencers, and understand attendees’ sentiments of the company. The exercise increased attendees’ engagement levels, as evidenced by their heightened Twitter activity. It also created a buzz and user-generated content on social channels, which had a positive impact on the brand – resulting in the company raising US$70,000 — a substantial increase over the US$50,000 it had targeted. cognizant reports 4
  • 5. ready to purchase, and direct them to the nearest stores. » Gain insight into customer spending habits, improve location-based services and identify locations for real-world marketing campaigns. Tools such as Klout8 can be used to gauge a person’s online influence based on their responses to social media posts. • Engage: Customers who are engaged with companies through social media spend 20% to 40% more than other customers, reveals a Bain & Co. study of more than 3,000 customers.9 Analyzing social media posts provides a deeper perspective on trending topics, hot brands and the type of content that is being shared, for example. This kind of analysis can be used to drive relevant content posts on channels like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and blogs, and propel content shares. Predictive analytics can also be used to understand what would interest customers, and the ideal time to publish content to “sweeten” content performance. For instance, Adobe Social predicts engagement levels and proposes the best time to post content on Facebook in order to improve content engagement and interaction. • Integrate: This stage involves integrating unstructured data across the organization with enterprise structured data to obtain a 360-degree view of customers. To achieve this, organizations must integrate their social media platforms with their existing master data management (MDM) systems. Once a customer’s social media data flows into the organization, the MDM hub can search to determine whether the customer profile already exists within the enterprise database. If so, it can automatically add relevant social media data to the master customer file. It can also update customer profiles whenever changes are made in source systems to reflect the latest customer information. Integrating social data with the MDM hub offers multiple benefits by enabling companies to: » Create digital profiles of customers to uncover various types of relationships and influencers. » Provide insights on customer activity across social channels. » Pull user location data as soon as customers update their location, using the check-in feature on social media sites. Sales can use this information to reach out to customers who are on the move and cognizant reports Social Media Command Centers: The One-Stop Shop A social media command center collects relevant conversations in real time, and then analyzes them to provide insights about customer sentiment, brand performance and the competition, for example, to inform decisions across various functional areas within the organization. Companies such as Dell, Cisco and Gatorade have implemented social media command centers primarily to listen and respond to customer conversations quickly.10 By combining data visualization tools, social media platforms and analytics, command centers allow organizations to monitor relevant online chatter in real time. This information can be used to quickly reach out to customers and support them in suitable ways, thus helping to secure their loyalty. For instance, T-Mobile uses a social media command center to prevent customer churn. Auto companies are employing these centers to predict recalls. General Electric has a command center to help the company quickly locate power outage areas and repair electric grids.11 Real-time monitoring can help adjust content based on hot topics, make on-the-fly changes to marketing campaigns and design content to improve customer engagement, for example. The latest tools allow companies to add data from other systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM), and configure data visualizations for smartphones, PCs and other mobile devices, apart from large television screens. Social media command centers have also been employed by sports organizers and non-profit organizations. The organizers of the Super Bowl, for example, launched a social media command center in 2012 to enhance the experience of the estimated 150,000 fans who visited the game site in Indianapolis. In this case, the center provided information about safety and service. The command center used keyword-based monitoring and geo-targeting of the Indianapolis/Indiana area across major social media sites12 to identify 5
  • 6. • Marketing: Organizations can no longer rely on analyzing yesterday’s customer chatter to devise today’s marketing campaigns. Social media analytics helps marketers cope with fast-changing customer preferences through real-time marketing. By discovering trending topics, marketers can quickly hone tweets and social media updates to align with hot topics, stay relevant and drive customer engagement. Companies such as Dell and McDonald’s use social media analytics to listen to customers in real time and adjust ad campaigns and content on the fly to resonate with social media users. In fact, based on social media feedback, Fifth Group Restaurants decided to tone down one of its Mexican dishes made with chilies, in spite of an internal debate.14 Marketers can also use image recognition technologies to see what images are being shared by customers and their impact on sales, for example. (See sidebar, next page). • Sales: Predictive analytics, such as affinity or market-basket analytics, provides details about products that are often bought together, as well as the right combination of products and services for customers – such as a game and a movie based on the game. This information can be used for cross-selling and up-selling, and customizing products and services. Customer sentiment can be used to forecast sales and revenues, and prepare in advance for any spikes in demand. The following are areas where social media analytics can have a big impact: • Innovation: Product development teams can tap into social media to understand what customers like or dislike about a brand, the desired product features Organizations that a target demographic can no longer wants, and popular features of competitors’ products. rely on analyzing This information can be yesterday’s used to fix defects in the customer chatter next iteration, trigger new ideas, and also review curto devise today’s rent ideas and products in marketing development. Most crowdcampaigns. sourcing campaigns now use social media to fuel ideas and contributions. Feedback on new product demonstrations can also provide inputs on customer preferences in various markets. • Customer service: Social media channels can help companies identify potential customerservice issues before they spiral and inflict damage to a brand’s reputation. By monitoring social media for real-time feedback during a new product release, the customer service team can identify issues and proactively reach out to customers to fix glitches. Customer service can also forecast what type of problems customers may encounter during specific times and prepare accordingly. • Competitive intelligence: In business, nothing can be more valuable than solid competitive intelligence. Social media analytics allows companies to track competitor mentions on social media, and understand how competitors are leveraging various social media platforms for brand promotion and customer engagement, for example. This information can be cognizant reports 6 and respond immediately to visitors who posted on Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms on event-related issues. The command center staff answered attendees’ inquiries about the event, routes, parking, food, cab service, hotels, tourist attractions and emergency tips, and provided real-time updates about traffic, weather, etc. The initiative was a hit, and managed to attract 50,000 fans – 10 times more than expected, and at a 3.6 to 1 positive to negative sentiment ratio.13 While numerous big brands have built their own command centers, others are undecided – fearing the repercussions of huge investments. Companies can build their own state-of-the-art command centers by partnering with technology providers, forming joint ventures, using managed services or choosing another evolving business model. The Case for Advanced Social Analytics Social media analytics has grown from simply being a tool for collecting customer likes and comments to an opportunity to gain critical business insights and make quick and effective decisions. By augmenting social media analytics with predictive capabilities, organizations can more accurately forecast what their customers are likely to do. Predictive analytics involves the use of regression models and advanced techniques, such as neural networks, to provide a complete view of customers and their future actions based on their transactional, social-media and other data.
  • 7. useful for reviewing and strengthening current social media strategies. Monitoring reviews and posts by bloggers and thought leaders about competitive products can provide valuable inputs that can be used to enhance various functions across the organization. Embracing Analytics as a Service Analyzing social media and other enterprise data is a difficult task. Handling huge volumes of data poses a significant challenge for organizations and requires substantial investments in people, processes, IT tools and infrastructure. Other challenges, such as a lack of domain capabilities and budgets, disparate databases and organizational silos can prevent organizations from effectively using social media data (see Figure 2, next page). A partner with the ability to handle complex analytics tasks can help companies take better advantage of analytics. With process virtualization and cloud computing, opportunities now exist for cost-cutting through global sourcing via the Business Process as a Service (BPaaS)15 delivery model. This can save precious capital expenditures (Cap-Ex) – estimated by some industry sources at up to 30% – by eliminating the cost of acquiring expensive hardware, software and key talent through outcomes-based and consumption pricing models. A subset of BPaaS, analytics as a service (AaaS) combines traditional knowledge process outsourcing (KPO) and business process outsourcing (BPO) capabilities with more efficient, cloudenabled ways of delivering analytical insights. This approach allows organizations to deploy analytics solutions tailored to their needs. The service can be increased or decreased as business requirements dictate, providing more flexibility in controlling operating expenses. Organizations should seek a partner that can seamlessly marry analytics with technology, rather than a pure-play analytics services provider that lacks industry-specific domain expertise. The key analytical component is derived from the ability to understand various business-use cases and develop predictive models capable of comprehending complex relationships and learning from historical data. A qualified partner must have expertise in extracting meaningful insights from social networks and social media and performing complex analyses on the data. Such a Quick Take Image Recognition Analytics Social networking sites such as Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and Flickr receive and host billions of photos, with thousands added every minute. Some of the images can be of brands, company logos and products, without any text to reference them. Since traditional social media monitoring tools can only track text (such as user comments and posts mentioning a brand), marketers often do not know what customers are referring to, who is using their company’s products, or if counterfeit versions of those products exist. Analytics with image recognition capabilities can help companies overcome this challenge and leverage images to enhance their market knowledge and extend their reach. Advanced image analytics with pixel-level analysis is gradually gaining acceptance among large retailers and advertising agencies. Companies such as Piqora and Curalate have developed image recognition technologies for social media sites such as Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram – allowing them to identify the most popular shared images from their Web sites, the most influential individual visitors, and the traffic that an image diverts to a target Web site, for example. A case in point: A coffee shop chain can use this technology to gather information about what its customers like and dislike; confirm the most popular shops in the chain; the number of times an image is shared and by how many people; its impact on sales; location-based knowledge and competitor information. The coffee chain can reach out to more customers, respond to user comments, engage with influencers and other prospective customers, and use images with positive comments for marketing after obtaining permission. cognizant reports 7
  • 8. Barriers to Using Social Media Data Effectively Nothing is Preventing Lack of Awareness About Opportunities General Lack of Engagement with Social Media Organizational Silos/Lack of Joined-up Thinking Lack of Resources to Make Sense of Data No Budget/Lack of Buy-in from Top of Organization Social Analytics are Separate from Multichannel Analytics and Business Intelligence Social Data Stored in Disparate Tools Lack of Tracking Capabilities and Analytics 0% 10% Companies 20% 30% 40% 50% Agencies n = more than 650 marketing professionals from companies and agencies across North America and Europe. Source: Econsultancy and Adobe, September 5, 2012 Figure 2 partner must also be able to integrate advanced analytics with enterprise systems, and enhance business efficiencies. As analytics processes become standardized and can uniformly be applied via cloud-enabled models (harnessing the growing clout of utility computing architectures), we believe that organizations stand to benefit greatly by associating themselves with partners that have invested in such capabilities. Looking Forward To experience the full potential of analytics, we advise companies to consider the following: • Identify key areas for deploying analytics. • Enter into relationships with partners capable of providing AaaS. • Design a comprehensive strategy for the adoption and implementation of analytics. • Develop an enterprise-wide data architecture. • Formulate customized strategies to capitalize on unique data. • Develop a fact-based decision-making culture focused on achieving specific goals. • Continuously refurbish and renew the organization’s analytics implementation. Footnotes 1 “Social Networking Reaches Nearly One in Four Around the World.” eMarketer, June 18, 2013. http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Social-Networking-Reaches-Nearly-One-Four-AroundWorld/1009976 “Experian Marketing Services Reveals 27 Percent Of Time Spent Online Is On Social Networking In 2012.” Prnewswire, April 16, 2012. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/experian-marketingservices-reveals-27-percent-of-time-spent-online-is-on-social-networking-in-2012-203209121.html 2 “Global Consumers’ Trust In Earned Advertising Grows In Importance.” Nielsen, April 10, 2012. http:// www.nielsen.com/us/en/press-room/2012/nielsen-global-consumers-trust-in-earned-advertisinggrows.html 3 4 “Big Content: The Unstructured Side of Big Data.” Gartner, May 1, 2013. http://blogs.gartner.com/ darin-stewart/2013/05/01/big-content-the-unstructured-side-of-big-data/ cognizant reports 8
  • 9. “Data-Rich and Insight-Poor: Marketers Planning to Turn Information into Intelligence in 2013.” Infogroup.com, 2013. http://lp.infogroup.com/Global/FileLib/Infogroup_Targeting_Solutions/DataRich_and_Insight-Poor_Survey_Findings_from_ITS_and_Yesmail.pdf 5 “Socially Devoted: The Next Generation of Customer Care is Social.” Social Bakers, July, 2013. http://www.tnooz.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/soc-dev-q2-infographic1.png 6 “Retail Case Kesko: The Evolution of Kesko’s Customer Experience Using Etuma’s Free-form Text Feedback Analysis Services.” Etuma, July 6, 2013. http://www.etuma.com/evolution-of-kesko-customer-experience-using-etuma-feedback-analysis/#more-1509 7 Klout allows users to measure their online influence. It currently tracks user activity around seven social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., and assigns a Klout Score, a number between 1and 100. Higher Klout Score represents greater influence. 8 “Putting Social Media to Work.” Bain & Company, 2011. http://www.bain.com/Images/BAIN_BRIEF_ Putting_social_media_to_work.pdf 9 “Examples of Social Media Command Centers for the World’s Largest Brands.” Salesforce Blog, December 5, 2012. http://blogs.salesforce.com/company/2012/12/examples-of-social-media-commandcenters-for-the-worlds-largest-brands.html 10 “Social Media Command Centers Built For Brands Not NASA.” Intelligent HQ, May 6, 2013. http:// www.intelligenthq.com/social-media-business/social-media-command-center/ 11 “Super Bowl First: Social Media Command Center.” Today, January 23, 2012. http://www.today.com/ tech/super-bowl-first-social-media-command-center-84788 12 “Learning From a Super Bowl’s Social Media Command Center.” Social Media Today, February 1, 2013. http://socialmediatoday.com/adam-chapman/1205706/learning-super-bowls-social-media-commandcenter 13 “Social Media Isn’t All Marketing.” Monkeydish, June 17, 2013. http://www.monkeydish.com/ideas/ articles/social-media-isn%E2%80%99t-all-marketing 14 BPaaS refers to the provision of business services encompassing underlying IT infrastructure, platform and skilled manpower, to run specific business processes within a virtual, globalized and distributed operating model. 15 Bibliography • “Customer Analytics in the Age of Social Media.” TDWI Research, 2012. http://tdwi.org/research/ 2012/07/best-practices-report-q3-customer-analytics-in-the-age-of-social-media/asset.aspx • “Who’s Sharing My Brand Images? Why Text-Based Social Media Monitoring Falls Short.” Adota, May 16, 2013. http://www.adotas.com/2013/05/who%E2%80%99s-sharing-my-brand-imageswhy-text-based-social-media-monitoring-falls-short/ • “The Social Economy: Unlocking Value and Productivity through Social Technologies.” McKinsey & Company, July, 2012. http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/high_tech_telecoms_internet/the_social_ economy • “Adobe Social Unveils Predictive Publishing for Facebook.” BusinessWire, April 24, 2013. http://www. businesswire.com/news/home/20130423006871/en/Adobe-Social-Unveils-Predictive-PublishingFacebook • “Social Media Analytics Software Pulls Useful Info Out Of Online Muddle.” SearchBusinessAnalytics, 2013. http://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/feature/Social-media-analytics-software-pullsuseful-info-out-of-online-muddle cognizant reports 9
  • 10. Credits Author and Research Analyst Vinaya Kumar Mylavarapu, Cognizant Research Center Subject Matter Expert Amit Shah, Manager, Cognizant Social Design Harleen Bhatia, Design Team Lead Suresh Satyavarapu, Designer About Cognizant Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH) is a leading provider of information technology, consulting, and business process outsourcing services, dedicated to helping the world’s leading companies build stronger businesses. Headquartered in Teaneck, New Jersey (U.S.), Cognizant combines a passion for client satisfaction, technology innovation, deep industry and business process expertise, and a global, collaborative workforce that embodies the future of work. With over 50 delivery centers worldwide and approximately 164,300 employees as of June 30, 2013, Cognizant is a member of the NASDAQ-100, the S&P 500, the Forbes Global 2000, and the Fortune 500, and is ranked among the top performing and fastest growing companies in the world. Visit us online at www.cognizant.com for more information. World Headquarters European Headquarters India Operations Headquarters 500 Frank W. Burr Blvd. Teaneck, NJ 07666 USA Phone: +1 201 801 0233 Fax: +1 201 801 0243 Toll Free: +1 888 937 3277 Email: inquiry@cognizant.com 1 Kingdom Street Paddington Central London W2 6BD Phone: +44 (0) 207 297 7600 Fax: +44 (0) 207 121 0102 Email: infouk@cognizant.com #5/535, Old Mahabalipuram Road Okkiyam Pettai, Thoraipakkam Chennai, 600 096 India Phone: +91 (0) 44 4209 6000 Fax: +91 (0) 44 4209 6060 Email: inquiryindia@cognizant.com © ­­ Copyright 2013, Cognizant. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the express written permission from Cognizant. The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.