Exploring Social Media Search Results

Rianne Kaptein

ECIR Industry Day

April 5th 2012 Barcelona

BACKGROUND OXYME

Fact Sheet

Est. in 2007

Based in Amsterdam

24 client staff (9 nationalities) and 350 social

media analysts around the globe

13 languages covered by native speakers

125 projects completed at:

o 30 Multinational clients

o In 12 countries

Consumer Goods FMCG

Clients

Transport & Logistics

Dutch National Railways

Dutch National Airport

Chemicals

Other sectors

APPROACH | QUALITY DATA BY AUTOMATED & HUMAN ANALYSIS

Collect opinions

with a webrobot

Smart analysis

Classify only

relevant data

Define a solid

search strategy

WHERE

WHAT

WHO

MESSAGE

SENTIMENT

Etc.

Total results

# Not relevant

# Relevant

Search strategy

Search period

Search terms

Analyze and

report

Human analysis

to remove not

relevant results

Inhouse built

specialized

search software

And thousands

more!

Translate high

quality data into

actionable insights

The Problem

SOCIAL MEDIA SEARCH TYPES

• Personal: What do my friends say about x?

• General: What does the world say about x?

• Commercial:

• What are people saying about my brand, product or campaign?

• What are people saying about my competitors?

Relevant result:

“Oh delicious! I just got Orangina at Albert Heijn. Orangina and I are friends for life”

SOCIAL MEDIA SEARCH CHARACTERISTICS

• The date and time of search results is important.

• Out of the temporal context, the meaning of the message might be

lost

• The query can include temporal restrictions, e.g. monitor a product

launch

• Ambiguity of search terms

• Many search results are short such as tweets, or Facebook status

updates.

• Not a lot of noise in the text

• Recall is important, you want to know how many people talk about you.

• Large volumes of data

• You want to know who is talking and how influential their messages are.

• Identify promotors of your products

• Identify complaints

• Advertisements and spam

TWITTER SEARCH RESULTS

ICE ROCKET SEARCH RESULTS

FINCHLINE SEARCH & MONITORING TOOL

TuneIn

•Goal: First impression about the buzz around a brand

•Exploit capabilities of human analysis: make it easy for the user to explore

and analyze the search results

•Show basic statistics

•Show differences over time

•Show all results: raise awareness about what people will find when they

search for your company

YET ANOTHER SEARCH ENGINE

TUNEIN

TUNEIN

TUNEIN

Two dimensions:

o Size of terms represents relative term frequency

o Colour of terms represents novelty of term

Instead of novelty other categorizations can be used as the second dimension

in the word cloud.

Categorizations can include :

• sentiment: positive vs. negative messages

• brands: messages mentioning "Braun" vs. messages mentioning "Gillette"

TWO DIMENSIONAL WORDCLOUDS

POSITIVE VS. NEGATIVE COFFEE MACHINE MESSAGES

Rubbish in, rubbish out!

Be careful with your categorizations.

If too many messages are not classified into the correct category, the quality of

the wordcloud will degrade.

Since in the interface it's easy to go back to the original message, users will not

trust the system if they see too many misclassified messages

WARNING SIGN 1

COMPARING DELONGHI AND SAECO BY OCCURRENCES IN TEXT

COMPARING TAGGED NEGATIVE POSTS SAECO AND DELONGHI

Be careful with small result sets:

If at least one of the two categories only consists of a few messages (e.g. less

than 25) the statistics on which the wordclouds are based are not so reliable

Think about your minimum sample size!

WARNING SIGN 2

OTHER POINTS OF ATTENTION

• Words can have multiple meanings

• Be clear on the fact it is an automatically generated summary

• Heavily retweeted messages can have a large influence on the wordcloud

Wordclouds are a great search interface element for social media search

• Navigational aid:

Easy drilldown on search results

• Summary of large number of search results

Short, to the point messages

CONCLUSIONS

www.oxyme.com

Cronenburg 150

1081 GN Amsterdam

tel: +31 20 625 000 5

e-mail: cu@oxyme.com

Thank you!