Business leaders are looking to combine their structured data with unstructured insights gleaned from social media platforms to make smarter and more proactive business-critical decisions.

1. • Cognizant 20-20 Insights
Social Media Convergence and Mobility
Executive Summary extract intelligence from social media chatter to
obtain early-warning signals that they can use to
Done right, business intelligence and analytics can
proactively shape and respond to ever-changing
have a direct and positive impact on an organiza-
customer sentiment. This white paper will dem-
tion’s performance. BI is particularly strategic and
onstrate how organizations across industries can
significantly improves the ability of the business
begin to measure the incremental business value
to accomplish its mission, survive in the downturn
of social media intelligence.
and thrive in the upturn. Tools that enable faster,
better and more informed decisions are particu-
Getting Social
larly valuable.
Business use of social media is no walk in the
However, internally collected and analyzed data park. Applying compelling and powerful informa-
is no longer enough for companies looking to tion about existing and potential customer needs,
make smarter and more proactive business- product improvement opportunities and valuable
critical decisions, particularly as the global revelations on customer experience requires
economy gyrates. An increasing number of digging into a panoply of social media platforms
business leaders are interested in creating a (such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook);
convergent view of all relevant insights, fusing corporate and third-party Web sites (such as
the structured data contained within convention- wikis, blogs, microblogs and comments on review
al databases with unstructured insights gleaned and rating sites); and media interactions (such as
from fast-proliferating social media platforms. RSS and widgets). There are challenges that need
These decision makers require a complete to be dealt with and opportunities that need to be
and accurate understanding of their customer capitalized upon.
landscape, markets and business to develop
effective strategies, make the right decisions and As consumers become more acquainted with
enact mid-course corrections. Getting started social networks to interact with brands directly,
requires companies to first understand and then it’s important that businesses are at least aware
seize advantage from the growing volume of of the negative conversations that take place in
tangible business insights emerging on the social social media. The majority of consumers use social
media front. media as the quickest way to voice a complaint
and then get the complaint resolved. The need
In today’s interconnected and dynamic global for a targeted, sustainable social media strategy,
economy, good news travels fast; however, bad and an effective monitoring and engagement
news travels even faster. Organizations need to solution, should be a high priority on all consum-
cognizant 20-20 insights | september 2011

2. er-facing companies’ communications agendas. Organizations that fail to meaningfully engage
The reasons are manifold: with informed consumers will lose market
share, particularly as smart devices with various
• Twitter now has 200 million users generating
operating systems replace standard Windows
350 million tweets a day.1
PCs and laptops for a multiplicity of purposes.
• YouTube says that over 48 hours of new videos As a result, organizations will need applications
are uploaded to the site every minute and that to monitor and manage brand perception and
around three-quarters of the material comes reputation to ensure that they can factor in the
from outside the U.S.2 unstructured inputs from on-the-go consumers
• As of July 2011, Facebook had more than 750 in a uniform and real-time way that can be easily
million active members. integrated with structured data already residing
within their customer relationship management
• Wikipedia has 19 million articles (over 3.6
systems. Social media and mobility, therefore,
million in English) written collaboratively by
need to be treated as extensions of an organiza-
volunteers around the world, and almost all of
tion’s business-technology strategy and culture.
its articles can be edited by anyone with access
to the site. As of July 2011, there were editions Applying Analytics
of Wikipedia in 282 languages.
Text analytics is essential for maximizing the
• In 2010, Internet users spent nearly a customer experience, effectively monitoring the
quarter (22.7%) of their online time on social social media world, conducting first-class data
networking sites — a 43% increase from the analysis and research, and improving the business
previous year.3 decision-making process. Text analysis tools
extract insights from data contained in social
Customer Centricity Means Mobility media posts to enable organizations to better
Analytics increases organizational performance understand consumer sentiment and to facilitate
by bridging the strategy and execution gap, more informed interactions with customers
enabling balance between risk and opportuni- across social platforms. By gathering information
ties and sharpening visibility across the entire on customer needs, opinions and desires from
execution cycle. While analytics helps organiza- social media and responding quickly, organiza-
tions listen, quantify and react to the ever-grow- tions can control their messaging, evaluate and
ing volumes of conversational data generated target relevant customers and increase market
across social media, the world is changing with share.
lightning speed. Customers are now in charge.
Social Analytics Lifecycle
Analyze unstructured
Listen to what customer feedback
customers are saying using text analysis. Capture customer
in order to improve brand, opinions and
service and customer evaluate them.
experience.
Analyzing
using a text Capture/
Unstructured, analysis evaluate
unsolicited feedback Listening tool customer Press release
like customer sentiments and targeted
comments on campaign
social media sites. Social
Action
Media
Figure 1
cognizant 20-20 insights 2

3. But watching every tweet or Facebook post can be that energy can be changed from negative to
time-consuming and costly. So, to build customer positive if the problem is acknowledged and
trust and loyalty in a technically-savvy, global and dealt with appropriately. Actively soliciting
diverse market, companies need advanced tools feedback, responding in real-time, offering
for gathering intelligence on consumer needs, to make the customer experience better and
preferences and interaction styles. Businesses following up in context will touch this customer
also need analytical tools that can help their in ways that no other marketing tactic can.
organization develop products and services And if this customer can be converted into an
that address these attributes — as well as the advocate, such outreach will have an amplifi-
marketing, promotion and pricing strategies that cation effect by dramatically improving overall
deliver these offerings. brand perception.
Text analysis tools use social media to help With text analytics your organization can:
companies listen to and learn from customer
conversations. They filter key marketing signals • Extract, categorize and summarize key
information from unstructured text and
from noise, analyze those signals, determine
convert it into a structured format so that it
the most appropriate reaction and trigger that
can be an effective data source for data inte-
reaction automatically. It is important to isolate
gration or business intelligence and reduce the
the contextual meaning from the collected
need for manual research.
content and achieve highly accurate categoriza-
tion. Integrating social intelligence into existing • Better understand online content regarding
data management or business intelligence consumer perception of brand, competition
systems can inform a course correction to change and the market in general, such as positive
outcomes and ultimately influence ROI. This will and negative opinions and judgments of
enable decision-makers to more quickly grasp the consumers about your organization’s brand,
information gleaned from social media and col- product or service. It can also help determine
laboratively act upon that information when it is what consumers want that’s not currently
presented in interactive visual models. available.
Three key elements must be addressed to properly • Use customer feedback contained in call-
center logs, as well as in customer survey
engage with customers and best leverage their
logs and the .com feedback channel to identify
feedback. These elements are:
problems (such as what problems customers
have with your product or company) and find
• Know where to look: Make sure you are
monitoring the social media platforms and out why customers are defecting. Another
forums where your consumers are posting. level of customer insight is requests (such as
Ensure monitoring of any locations where what your customer wants in terms of product
people can criticize your products or services. features or service), as well as situations in
which the organization can turn an unhappy
• Get your customers talking: Encourage a customer into a happy one. Such information
two-way conversation with your customers. can define strategic customer service improve-
Make sure you are encouraging positive con- ment programs.
versation and monitoring the dialogue.
• Know the market trends and evaluate mar-
• Respond to customer feedback: Be sure to keting campaigns to plan future campaigns.
address every conversation — both positive Traditional market research may lead the firm
and negative — with accurate information and to view customers as statistics. Managers can
in a timely manner. It’s important to recognize become so focused on the data that they stop
the positive side of negative feedback. For one hearing the real voice of the customer.
thing, customer complaints always help you
know where you stand, what went wrong and • Obtain reports of product usage, when
what is needed to improve. More importantly products fail, the most frequent customer
though, it gives you the power to turn unhappy enhancement requests and high-priority
customers into advocates for your brand by suggestions for quality improvements. Track-
reframing negative situations into positive ing such detail over time yields insights into
ones. It takes a certain amount of energy for the evolution of your organization’s product
a customer to provide negative feedback, and issues and quality.
cognizant 20-20 insights 3

4. Implementing a VoC Program data for subsequent crawls. You can schedule
a crawl to run at a specified time.
One of the more important tools for improving
customer satisfaction and loyalty across the 4. Output to database: VoC annotations gener-
enterprise is a strong Voice of the Customer (VoC) ated by a ThingFinder service are stored in the
program. VoC metrics illuminate how well the VoC repository.
needs of particular market segments are being 5. Integrate with structured data: Create a
met, what your existing customers like about you universe (metadata layer) using the Business
and why a campaign did or did not generate the Objects designer tool and the VoC repository
expected revenue targets. Over time, these results as a source.
are used for trending and monitoring.
6. Display and analyze: Use BusinessObjects
Here is a sample workflow for implementing a Web Intelligence, Xcelsius, Crystal Reports or
VoC program: other dashboards.
1. Create data sources using one of three Figure 2 depicts how the components of the
adapters: sample solution kit work together. As shown,
> Web site adapter: Crawls Web sites using the VoC annotation handler writes annotations
the HTTP protocol. extracted using a processing manager to the
VoC repository (VoCR). Once the repository is
> File system adapter: Crawls directories on
populated, using the universe (representing VoC
the file system.
data), users can generate reports to illustrate
> Database adapter: Crawls database tables various sentiments and requests associated with
using the JDBC protocol. selected concepts, or they can view concept
frequency.
2. Create a collection: Here you can combine
multiple sources within one collection, add Getting Started
text analytics through such services as
The following text analysis components should
ThingFinder and filter data as needed. You
already be installed:
can also add a custom group entity such as
problem, request and sentiment within the • Text services platform
ThingFinder service.
• Processing manager (must be installed on the
3. Set up a crawl to extract relevant data: You same system on which you plan to install the
can crawl all the information (for a first-time solution kit)
crawl) or only a subset of new and/or modified • Annotation manager (optional)
Evaluating Customer Sentiment
Web Pages Text Analysis Business Objects
Processing Manager Enterprise
Universe
Data Source VOC
Adapter Handler Web
Reports
Documents
and file
shares
Text Services
Platform VOCR
Extraction
Database with text Service SQL Server
(structured and
unstructured data)
Figure 2
cognizant 20-20 insights 4

5. Minimum installation requirements for the • Software:
solution kit components include:
> BusinessObjects Text Analysis XI 3.0+SP3
• VoC extraction pack with VOC add-in
• VoC repository > BusinessObjects Enterprise XI
3.1+SP3+Fixpack 3.3
• VoC annotation handler
• Database and driver
Footnotes
1
Twitter’s engineering department, July 15, 2011, https://twitter.com/#!/TwitterEng/
status/91892509306920960
2
YouTube blog post, May 25, 2011, http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2011/05/thanks-youtube-communi-
ty-for-two-big.html
3
“What Americans do Online: Social Media and Games Dominate Activity,” NielsenWire, August 2, 2010,
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/what-americans-do-online-social-media-and-games-
dominate-activity/
About the Authors
Indrajit Chaudhuri is a BI Architect/System Administrator within the Cognizant SAP Business Intelli-
gence (SAP BI) Practice. Indrajit holds a master’s of science (MS) degree in engineering from the South
Dakota School of Mines & Technology and can be reached at Indrajit.Chaudhuri@cognizant.com.
Abhishek Mishra is a Service Delivery Manager within Cognizant’s Manufacturing Industry Practice.
With over eleven years of industry experience, he has worked across diverse consulting engage-
ments with leading health care and manufacturers and logistics providers. Abhishek holds a bachelor’s
of engineering degree in electronics from Jiwaji University, Gwalior, India. He can be reached at
Abhishek.Mishra2@Cognizant.com.
Amit Sharma is a Senior Consultant within Cognizant Business Consulting (CBC). He holds an
MBA from Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota and can be reached at
Amit.Sharma5@Cognizant.com.
About Cognizant
Cognizant (NASDAQ: CTSH) is a leading provider of information technology, consulting, and business process out-
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and business process expertise, and a global, collaborative workforce that embodies the future of work. With over 50
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