Making Sense Of Unstructured Social Media Data

Social media has ushered in a new era of a more democratic publishing process, which has been great for us as individuals, as well as businesses. It’s great for individuals because we have an unprecedented ability to create and share — share our thoughts, passions, world views and hobbies — and by doing so connect with likeminded individuals all over the globe, regardless of nationality, geography, language or timezone. The world has become smaller, and no man is an island any longer. It’s also been great for businesses, because we now know what our customers and prospects, and we don’t even need to ask them — all we need to do is listen. Listening is not easy, however; especially due to the volume of content that’s created. The problem is further exacerbated for large consumer brands, which can have tens of thousands of people talking about them at any given minute.

This is why unstructured text analytics are going to become absolutely crucial to those businesses who want to listen, understand and scale their listening and understanding. This is why we do what we do at Attensity. From the more basic, do-it-yourself tag phrases inside the Attensity360 product, to the more advanced semantic analytics in Attensity Analyze — about allowing brands to make sense of it all with actionable insights.

Making sense of it all is no trivial matter, and in this brief video I talk about creating word clouds via Wordle and phrase clouds via Attensity360. Applications range from personal branding, to ensuring that your blog is “on brand”, to surfacing trends in conversations around your brand or product.