Big Data, Data Mining, and Machine Learning: Value Creation for Business Leaders and Practitioners

CHAPTER 14 Case Study of Online Brand Management

In this modern information age, business success is closely tied to your success on the Internet. This is especially true of manufacturers. Online brand management is a challenging, fast-paced environment where ideas or perceptions that once took weeks can evolve in hours. The popular microblogging site Twitter reported in the fall of 2012 that it was now seeing 500 million tweets per day on the site. A quick search for this large company revealed thousands of tweets from their customers. With each five-second refresh, more than 20 new tweets would arrive almost around the clock. It is impossible for any human or any department of humans to keep up with all the customer comments about a company from just this one microblogging service. Now add updates from other popular social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and others, and staying on top of consumers’ thoughts on your product can appear to be an impossible task. The amount of information that must be processed to keep an accurate view of the brand’s value and then be prepared to promote, defend, or anticipate changes in the brand can seem to be a daunting task.

A number of analytical techniques can be used to help tame this task. Here we will talk about Twitter, but these six techniques could be used for almost any human-generated feed of data.

1. Identify the language in which the user is commenting. Language detection is an important first step because it can help determine ...