Localspeak

A Tool for Global Social Insights

6 July 2011

As Netbase begins offering non-US social media analytics on its Insights Workbench, starting with English-speaking countries, Localspeak took the new tool out for a test drive to see how the motor purrs.

Impressively, within an hour we had charted the comparative brand passion index of several global mineral water brands, showing the relative brand equity for two brands, each one tested across US, UK, and Canada markets – extracted from 12 months of social sound bites. Within minutes, and contextually relevant to our initial study, terabytes of social media verbatims were automatically processed by the natural language processing engine to net-high precision verbatim. While our modest experiment was merely a foray into the cross-cultural functionality of Insights Workbench, we were able to intuitively and effortlessly leverage, for our new global brand equity study, theme mapping, as well as brand focus, content and domain filters previously used in a US-only mineral water brand study.

The chart we generated below exhibits the relative brand passion for Perrier and Pellegrino mineral water brands in US, UK and Canada markets; the passion intensity results provide a valuable snapshot comparison of their brand and market equity in each of the three countries. However, in this initial global market social media experiment, we were more interested in discovering the Insights Workbench functionality – and potential for delivering cross-cultural insights.

Due to the fact that the tool automatically applied our theme mapping from the previous US study to the emotions extracted from the UK and Canada verbatims, we were able to quickly scan, or read in their entirety, the verbatims for new unmapped themes particular to the new global markets. We were also able to follow their trail within the context of a particular domain.

During our experiment we took a peek several times under the hood into numerous domains in order to determine whether a UK or Canada theme that had not been automatically mapped for our pre-set themes should be mapped. With few exceptions, we confirmed theme mapping had been accurately leveraged within context across the new markets.

Partly out of curiosity, and in part QA rigor, we sought to verify whether some of the new UK and Canada domains data was contextually relevant. In our brief detours, which took us logically into several UK and Canada sports-related domains, we found that Pellegrino mentions in Canada referred to either the name of a team member competing in the 2011 Stanley Cup Playoffs or a boxer, unlike the body-building domain discussions that revolved around Perrier in the US. While data was visible for verification, the tool had analyzed accurately the context of these mentions and excluded them for automatic theme mapping.

Although our first experiment in global social media insights was reserved both in scale and resource investment, the results spoke volumes in terms of future potential growth areas for global market research, brand innovation, and marketing.

To speculate modestly, the implications of the experiment – in exponential global terms – are huge for new rich time- and cost-effective hybrid market research models, brand extension and marketing channels innovation.

To be continued…