The guest speaker, Arthur Goldstruck introduced the evening with social media trends and research conducted by World Wide Worx. The Echo-social (@Echo_chat) media-monitoring launch took on a new face-lift by illustrating a more multi-faceted approach including SMS, email, telephone, blogs, website and social media.
Arthur Goldstruck (@art2gee), managing director of World Wide Worx,started the audience with explaining how the Sub-Sahara undersea cables allowed for a rapid increase in South African internet use.
In the next ten years, as predicted by Goldstruck, there will be 18 million digital participants. An organisation would need to recognise this growth and consider shifting their spending on social media with a great emphasis on mobile apps.
According to Goldstruck social media analytics is the second priority for an organisation to spend their budget on. An interesting recent statistic show how Twitter users have raised from 2.4 million users in 2012 to 5.5 million users in 2013 indicating a huge interest for informal conversations.
As Goldstruck indicated there will be a need for analytics in our near future, to sieve through the chaos and find meaningful insights for an organisation to engage on a more informal communication platform with their online clients. As much as 42% of Twitter users expect a company to respond to their enquiries in less than an hour, indicating a need for fast and effective response time.
Echo-social (#EchoSocial), part of Echo-echo, is geared towards the executive, to help assist with a more qualitative understanding and a deeper insight rather than quantitative or linear information.
According to the head of Social Insights at Echo-social, Robin Meisel (@RobinMeisel), traditional social listening and sentiment analysis tools have dealt with big data by essentially avoiding analysing it as a whole. These tools extract small slices of data, which may or may not be representative, and pass it over to the crowd to explain what the sentiment (positive, negative or neutral) behind the data is.
Echo-social facilitates an online dashboard allowing for simultaneous monitoring of online conversation across social platforms including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging platforms and forums.
A few of the metrics used by Echo-social include language usage, the psychological drivers behind conversations, linguistic insight, advanced word clouds and geo-location analysis.
A dictionary is incorporated to allow for better understanding of the linguistics feature which measures actual discussions by focusing on parts of speech in a conversation. Another two main features including taxonomy, which is a multi-faceted analytics tool focused on the qualitative approach to social media analytics, and geo-location which allows your organisation to pinpoint where a complaint or compliment is situated.
A client is able to access the information on a dashboard on the Echo-social website that will prompt them to add their log in details and be in control with their monitoring requests.
