There can be little denying that businesses seek, and often need, every edge they can get to stay ahead in the information age, with the proliferation of social media and the rise of big data only complicating matters.

However, a new tool, Echo-Social, launched into the South African market, enables businesses to see what social media users really think about them. According to the company, this brings a much-needed contextual, linguistic and psychological insight to social data analysis, thus affording businesses a means of more effectively managing their reputation online.

At the launch, it was pointed out that a vast majority of businesses agree with the statement that social media has the potential to grow their business; although only 19% of businesses surveyed indicated that they were deriving as much value from their social media operations as they could. Furthermore, World Wide Worx founder Arthur Goldstuck pointed out that most companies merely measure their effectiveness on social media by considering the number of the followers they have on Twitter or how many likes they have on Facebook.

He added that neither of  are considered a good measurement, as these fail to take into account what people are actually saying about the business in question.

Robin Meisel, the head of social insights at Echo-Social

Do you hear me?

Addressing this, at its launch in Melrose, Echo-Social explained that its offering uses “a sophisticated blend of technologically-advanced linguistic processing and understanding of psychological drivers to determine what is steering conversations on social media.” The main reason for doing this is to extract contextual insights for immediate action and results.

Robin Meisel, the head of social insights at Echo-Social elaborated that 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 then rely on crowd-sourcing to explain what the sentiment - positive, negative or neutral - behind the data is. This, he asserted, only scratches the surface of analysis.

According to Meisel, we are entering what he calls the Industrial Revolution of the social age. “By developing a tool that harnesses natural language processing and linguistic dictionaries, the depth and breadth of analysis can be expanded exponentially to keep up with the explosion of social data. The resources that were tied to sentiment analysis can now specialise in providing market insight.”

An inside view of exactly what the Echo-Social system looks like, here, using Nelson Mandela as a search term for analysis on social media.

Echo effect

Echo-Social’s online dashboard allows for the simultaneous monitoring of the online conversation across social platforms including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging platforms and forums. “If it has a data stream, we can track it,” said Meisel.

The unique metrics used by Echo-Social include market segmentation, competitor activity, language usage, the psychological drivers behind conversations, linguistic insight, topics of relevance, advanced word clouds (drawing correlations between words allowing for early identification of trends) as well as geo-location analysis.

“What sets Echo-Social apart, is the ability to customise the service and metrics based on a client’s specific needs and interests,” continued Meisel, adding that it can be tailored for any business sector or industry.

To the point

While the number of social mentions increases daily, it is becoming increasingly important for brands and businesses to become proactive.  As much as 42% of Twitter users expect a company to respond to their enquiries in less than an hour.

“Along with these expectations come great opportunities for customer service. Seventy percent of users who receive help via social customer service avenues will return as customers in the future,” he explained. “There is tremendous business-value to be derived from social media – but only when it is leveraged effectively. Echo-Social does just that,” he concluded. Interested parties can visit www.echoecho.co.za for more information.