The invention disclosed herein relates generally to targeted advertising systems, and more particularly to a method and system that utilizes a customer's social media activities to enable a business to better communicate with its customers to provide the right message, at the right time, and through the right channel.
In today's highly competitive business world, advertising to customers, both potential and previous, is a necessity. Businesses are always looking for ways to increase revenue, and increasing its sales to customers through advertising plays a large part in many business's plans for growth. Advertising has shown to be an effective method to inform, persuade or remind target buyers of the business' goods, services or goodwill, with the ultimate goal being that an advertisement will result in the sale of the goods or services. Studies have confirmed that the more that an advertisement can be customized for a particular intended recipient, for example to include some personal information relating to the recipient, the more likely that it is to be successful. Such customized advertisements, however, require knowledge of some personal information of the intended recipient, which many businesses may not possess.
The present invention alleviates the problems described above and provides a powerful data and analytical platform which can identify, retrieve and analyze social media data pertinent to a business' customers to derive personal information that can be used for targeted advertising, thereby helping the business improve and grow. A scanning engine is provided that can search a wide range of social media spaces, including, for example and without limitation, FaceBook, Twitter, Yelp, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Blog, etc. to identify the presence of a business' customers (either other businesses or consumers) using information such as the customer's name, address, web site, email, business keywords or other identifiable information. The scanning engine will use the most suitable scanning techniques for the customer based upon known information. For example, if the customer is another business, the scanning engine can scan by name, address, email or other relevant business keywords. If the customer is a consumer, the scanning engine can scan by name or email address. The scanning engine runs as cron jobs, which can run as scheduled or on demand. The scanning engine can be configured, managed and monitored from both command line and an administration console (a central administration interface to configure, manage and monitor components of the platform). The scanning process can be configured to run in multiple instances and run on multiple nodes to improve performance and scalability for large scanning.
A data engine will collect the social activity data from the various social networking sites based upon social presence identified by the scanning engine. The data engine will use appropriate data acquisition techniques to retrieve social media data from the various social media sites, including, for example, the social media sites Application Programming Interfaces (API), such as Facebook Graph API, Twitter API, Yelp API etc, and scraping. The scraping technique will be used when APIs are not adequate to acquire enough data. In the case of multiple scanning results returned for a given entity, a matching process will be used to filter scanning results by known entity information. The data engine also has a data normalization process to merge and normalize social media data from various sources for an analytics engine. The data engine is designed as CRON jobs which can run as scheduled or on demand. The data engine process can be configured, managed and monitored from both command line and administration console.
An analytic engine will analyze the information collected by the data engine utilizing, for example, social dashboards (an overview of a business' customers' social media presence), topic identification, sentiment analysis, and social network graphical analysis. This will give a business a 360 degree view of its business and customers and help the business to find the cause behind the effect and develop the right strategy to improve and grow its business. The present invention can provide various reporting functionalities for different scenarios. For example, for marketing, the present invention can provide an overview of a business's customers' social presence, social connections, social activity level and topics/interests/social triggers etc. to help the business design different marketing strategies to target its online customers. It can also provide extra social data to help the business to augment its customer profiling capabilities. For brand monitoring, the present invention can provide a business with an overview of its social image/reputation by collecting, merging and analyzing reviews/comments/data from various social media sources. It can also give the business a detailed social media competitor analysis. The present invention leverages rich information generated by consumers on various social networking sites to provide a new source of customer insight and combines social media data, location intelligence and business transaction data to create a unique business insight and trigger actionable recommendations.
The accompanying drawings illustrate presently preferred embodiments of the invention, and together with the general description given above and the detailed description given below, serve to explain the principles of the invention. As shown throughout the drawings, like reference numerals designate like of corresponding parts.
In describing the present invention, reference is made to the drawings, wherein there is seen in
After data has been collected, a social analytics engine 50 will conduct various analyses using the information gathered from the various social media sites to create effective social measurements that measure a business's and the business's customers' social participation and activity level. An accurate and easy to use social participation and activity level measurement is a very important tool that can enable a small business to strategize, act, and monitor their use of social media for business purposes. The present invention provides a plurality of indices to measure social media related activities or characteristics of small businesses, including (i) a measure of the business's social presence activity level, (ii) a measure of the business's customers' social media adoption level, and (iii) a measure of a business's social reputation, as described below.
The social presence activity level score measures a business's engagement level on a social media site, such as a Facebook fan page or Twitter account. There are multiple levels of information regarding consumers' engagement level at a business's social media site, including Reachability (R): number of total fans or followers, Interactivity (I): active fans (total number of fans who post at least one message); and Activity (A): Average number of consumers who post a message on the site every week. Each of these variables is utilized to calculate a business's social presence (SP) score on a particular social media site according to the following equation:
(SP)=R*(1+a*(I/R))+b*(A/R)) Equation (1)
Note that a and b are tunable parameters, and can be adjusted accordingly depending on the objective of the business. For example, if engaging actively with customers is the most important objective of the business, then a really high value of “a” and “b” can be set. There are two benefits of creating this one score measurement: first, most viral effect of social media marketing only work well when the consumers actively post or respond to the business's marketing message. Thus, an active individual should have a much higher value than an inactive one. Equation (1) allows a business to adjust these parameters based upon business objectives. Secondly, a well-defined single score measurement will make any following measurement and statistical analysis tasks much easier to study how a business uses social media sites, especially when there are needs to compare multiple businesses, or compare a business's performance with its competitors or industry verticals. Note that this score (SP) is a measurement for a single social media site. The scores for multiple social media sites can be further combined to calculate one score for a business given all presence of a business on social media sites is available by summing all of the individual scores for each site.
The business's customers' social media adoption level provides an indication to a business as to how much its customers use social media sites. An important factor in deciding how much effort a business should put on social media is whether their customers are using these social media sites. The present invention can determine how much a business's customers have been using social media sites, thus giving business owners directions on whether social media is a good channel for them to communicate with their customers.
The business's social reputation measurement provides an indication of how the business is perceived by its customers based on discussions about the business on social media sites. There are multiple sources of a business's reputation on the Internet, such as different review sites like Yelp, people's mentions in tweets, or discussions in online forums. There are mainly two perspectives related to a business's reputation: number of people talking about the business and the overall sentiment of the discussions about the business. The scanning engine 40 will identify relevant instances where the business is mentioned, and can provide each of those instances for use by the business. The analytics engine 50 can build a white list of relevant social media sites to improve the search accuracy, and use sentiment analysis techniques to analyze the content of relevant discussions about the business and calculate an overall sentiment reputation of the business.
A business application logic layer 60 provides several processes that allows the user to review the data collected and analyzed by the scanning engine 40 and analytical engine 50. Logic layer 60 can generate reports 62 that will give a user an overview of the user's customers' social media presence.
Business application logic layer 60 can also be used to analyze text from a business's or customer's social media sites/activity. By analyzing the text of social media activity, e.g., the text of posts made by a customer on a social media site, the logic layer 60 can determine the topics of the posts, and perform a sentiment analysis to determine the customer's sentiment about a specific topic. Thus, the present invention can identify a list of topics in which a business or individual is interested in, as well as their attitude toward that topic. This will allow a business to utilize such information to generate marketing material based on the customers' activities. For example, using the information provided by the present invention, an e-mail campaign list that utilizes a social filter to identify customers whose social media site activity meets specified requirements can be generated. For example, filtering could be performed using social media site participation, customer location, topics discussed, amount of activity, interactivity (e.g., number of fans, followers, friends, etc.).
In addition, there are some special topic analyses that can be more valuable than others in the business context. By detecting an event announced in a social media site by a business or individual customer, it is possible to determine that an upcoming event can be used as a good communication point. For example, if the user is a travel agent, and the business application logic layer 60 identifies a customer that posted on a social media site that he will soon be taking a vacation, the travel agent business can send the customer communications about current travel promotions and deals being offered by the travel agent. Event detection of a competitor using the competitor's social media activity can also provide a valuable tool for a business to keep updated with its competitors' activities and promotions.
The business application logic layer 60 further includes a social brand monitoring process, which can utilize the business's social reputation measurement, that provides a business with insight with respect to its reputation and brand based on discussion in which the business is mentioned. For example, the social brand monitoring process can provide the number of times a user business is mentioned in social media sites, the details about the specific sites, time of discussion, and details by sentiment, e.g., either positive, negative, or neutral mentions. Thus, a business can find out what its customers are saying about the business, both positive and negative, on social media sites. This will give a business a full 360 degree view of its business, allowing it to address any issues that customers may have that would not have otherwise been known to the business. Similarly, a competitor analysis process within the business application logic layer 60 can be used to provide a comparison of a business with its competition's social brand presence. This can provide a business with insight as to what its customers like/dislike about both the business and its competitors, and allow the business to take actions to address customer issues and ensure continued customer loyalty.
The business application logic layer 60 can also determine the online social influence and/or reachability of a business or individual. Once an individual or business social presence is identified on social media sites, such as, for example, Facebook and Twitter, the logic layer 60 can retrieve information related to an individual or business's social influence (i.e. number of Twitter followers and Facebook friends), and identify high social influencers based their social influence score. Based on the number of follower/friends of an individual, the number of posts made by the individual, and the topic of the posts, it can be determined if a particular individual may be a highly influential customer for the business.
Referring now to
Thus, the present invention builds various business applications based upon its analytical functions. For instance, by combining a business's customer social adoption rate and their social media engagement measures, the present invention will be able to recommend whether the business can spend more or less resources on social media customer communications. By combining reputation management, social media engagement measures, and events detection, the present invention can help a business to compare its social media use and its social reputation with its customers, and adjust its business process accordingly.
While preferred embodiments of the invention have been described and illustrated above, it should be understood that these are exemplary of the invention and are not to be considered as limiting. Additions, deletions, substitutions, and other modifications can be made without departing from the spirit or scope of the present invention. Accordingly, the invention is not to be considered as limited by the foregoing description but is only limited by the scope of the appended claims.
This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application Ser. No. 61/515,032, filed Aug. 4, 2011, the specification of which is hereby incorporated by reference.
Number | Date | Country | |
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61515032 | Aug 2011 | US |