Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered social listening reports offer real-time intel that your brand needs to be successful online. And there are three that are essential for campaign tracking, audience insight and crisis response, which we’ll share a bit about below!
How does AI help with any of these social listening capabilities? It enhances each, offering a level of insight unmatched by less technologically advanced efforts. More specifically, the processing speed and accuracy of a well-trained AI is precisely what brands need to capture insight well ahead of competitors.
And Next Generation AI has upped that ante considerably. NetBase’s AI Studio, a first-in-class AI social listening solution, offers automated theme identification to understand audience adjacencies and better identify issues, ideas and influencers. It’s technology your brand definitely wants to be on the early adopter side of:
As we’ll share in just a second, Next Generation AI-powered social listening helps brands:
- Prepare for and monitor campaign success, while identifying changes that need to happen in-motion, as well insight to inform future efforts
- Identify new audiences and uncover unmet needs of existing audiences
- Track crises in a way that alerts brands to them before they even happen, and helps direct a strategic response when they hit
Let’s get to it!
AI Report #1: Campaign Tracking
You know what you need to promote, but how is a wildcard, as there are many layers to the online onion. And if you get it wrong (where and how to focus your marketing efforts), you’ll cry while peeling it, alright.
There are so many moving parts and such detailed effort goes into the creation of campaign materials, so taking time to fine tune your approach is wise. Sorting out these specifics begins with pre-planning and takes you through to not only current action items, but to forward-planning for future campaigns as well:
- First, you analyze data related to past campaigns, evaluating their performance and establishing benchmarks (against which to measure future campaign performance)
- Second, you analyze data related to ongoing campaigns
- And finally, you generate and evaluate ideas for future campaigns
You do this by creating a topic and a theme in NetBase. These allow you to filter content with specific characteristics that you’ve defined.
Talking About Topics
A topic contains the search settings used to collect posts, including their text and embedded media, from the NetBase index for your particular analysis. The search criteria specifies the date range and language for posts you want to analyze.
And there are filters configured to match data by keyword, channel, author, or many other criteria. Topics may include:
- Brands, such as Coca-Cola or McDonald’s
- Products, such as Sprite or Big Mac
- Product categories, such as fast food or soft drinks
- Channels, such as a Facebook fan page or Twitter handle
- Industry categories or topics of interest, such as dieting or snacking
- Geo-fenced regions, such as all Tweets published from within Yankee Stadium
- Image content, such as to your product’s logo
- Topical issues, such as pending tax laws or a viral hashtag
- Authors and influencers, such as a celebrity who posts regularly about a product
- Domains, such as NYTimes or eBay Forums
Below is the set-up for a simple, keyword-based topic for Red Bull energy drink:
Apply a Theme for Deeper Exploration
And then a theme is a set of saved filters that, when applied to a topic, segments conversations to perform a deeper and more customized analysis. For example, the theme shown below filters conversations by terms related to quality, such as “premium,” “#reliable,” and “well made.” You might apply this theme to a product topic to analyze only conversations about the product that are related to quality.
Themes can be used repeatedly on a number of different topics and are amazingly handy to have available.
Combining topic and theme filters, you analyze the intel using widgets and dashboards to uncover insights and trends that help brands make actionable business decisions. The insight allows you to understand campaign performance and further optimize the campaign if necessary by:
- Assessing volume, tone, engagement levels, and recurring subject matter with mentions of your campaigns
- Validating your campaign ideas in the context of your brand, your category, and competitive brands and categories.
- Expanding on preexisting campaign ideas or ideas used in past campaigns.
And there are Audience themes available too. These allow you to upload a list of individual authors that you can apply to a social web topic to analyze their specific posts. But we’ll get to the many ways you can analyze your audience next!
AI Report #2: Audience Insight
Build audiences by analyzing a social web topic to match the conversations that relate to your brand’s subject(s) of interest and then saving those topic’s authors as an audience.
Example audiences could include Katy Perry followers, millennial moms, and followers of the @nike Twitter handle.
To understand what drives customers to purchase, brands need to build multi-dimensional social stories about their audiences that go beyond layering demographics, interests, and social data. It requires a complete profile of customers in real time—who they are, what they want, and what motivates their behavior.
Audience Insights allow brands to:
- Make highly customized audiences
- Filter results to find the unique attributes
- Discover emerging trends and unsolicited feedback
- Review data and target audiences in real time
Segmenting an audience “anchor” (they key differentiator you’re filtering for) is tricky at first – but only because there are so many choices. Businesses can filter by brand affinities, interests, influences, attitudes/personas, and may more.
For example, if you want to analyze people who self-identify as part of a group, you could anchor on bios and self-descriptions. If you want to target an audience on the basis of interests or emotions, you could anchor on behaviors or affinities.
Audience Analysis
And the next step is analysis—unlocking real-time psychographic insights to understand every layer of your audience onion. The sheet variety of widgets and analysis dashboards available to help you do this quickly and easily is stunning.
And the new dimensions a brand uncovers, enhances its understanding of evolving target audiences, while driving meaningful growth. Targeting specific audience segments based on what they are saying and doing, the ability to develop highly personalized content to engage them – those capabilities are quickly becoming table stakes. Get there!
And having accurate, in-depth audience insight not only helps brands keep the pulse of their audiences, it’s also super important to have that baseline trust in your data when a crisis hits . . .
AI Report #3: Crisis Response
Crisis Tracking shows a snapshot that identifies the effect an issue or crisis is having on your overall brand. It also identifies key conversation drivers. This helps you improve messaging and offer actionable guidance to your PR and marketing teams.
It helps brands track growth of an issue as it happens, as well ask how big it is compared to previous concerns and how much of the overall brand conversation is devoted to this topic.
A crisis report powered by social listening helps brands answer:
- Who is talking?
- Where they are talking?
- How broad is the impact?
- Who are the influencers and known detractors?
- What are audience characteristics?
- Is it mostly insiders or consumer conversation?
- What content is being shared around the issue?
Further, it’s important to understand how people are talking about the issue as you begin to craft your response.
Does something need to change in your messaging or have you struck up a good balance. Having this data in real-time is the difference between crisis management and crisis chaos:
Sharing Your AI-powered Insight Report
Once you have your reports set up, it’s time to share this amazing insight with stakeholders. And you can do that in a variety of ways:
Exporting Dashboards as a PDF or Excel spreadsheet:
Scheduling Dashboard Reports to email an export of your report on a regular, user-defined cadence:
You can also share dashboards to present live data and allow users to perform their own analyses without altering your underlying topic and theme-level datasets. And generating Live Reports to present live data without accompanying analysis capabilities.
Be sure to reach out and we can show you how each looks, depending on the report type – and ways your brand can start using each today!
Joe Russell is the Chief Financial Officer of NetBase Quid
