Using Social Media Analytics to gauge Australia’s reaction to the upcoming Federal Election

As a new starter at SAP (this is my 6^th week) and part of the ANZ Cloud Marketing team, I have been busy familiarising myself with the range of Cloud-specific products available. And there is one product in particular that has really caught my attention – especially because I am in Marketing – and that’s the ‘SAP Cloud for Social Media Analytics by NetBase’ software.

It is amazing!

But don’t just take my word for it, have a look at the images below. With the help of my colleague Adam Cordner, we’ve created a dashboard to look at the community’s reaction to the upcoming Australian Federal Election. And it provides very interesting reading!

Bear in mind that this could be used by any company to give insights into, for example, the popularity of their latest advertising campaign and/or product launch. It really is an amazingly powerful tool that can allow a business to put their customers’ feelings at the heart of any business decision.

Note: a dashboard would normally be used in real-time by a business, collecting and analysing words, feelings and phrases from millions of conversations going on in Social Media at that particular moment in time, or over a period of days, months or years. In this case we’re using screen grabs – because when people express their opinions online they often use ‘colourful’ language that is not suitable for a public forum like this, so we’ve had to censor some of the content.

Take a look at the word clouds below that show the community’s reaction to the election over the last week. This software actually allows a business to quantify net sentiment through its ‘natural language processing’ (NLP) engine. On the social web, language is even harder to understand because people fill it with colloquialisms, misspellings, slang, and sarcasm. The NLP engine reads and understands millions of social media postings every hour.

Note: the green words are positive words, the red words are negative. The size of the words is determined by the number of times those words have been mentioned in relation to the chosen topic, ie, in this case “Kevin Rudd” or “Tony Abbott”, when looking at the community’s Emotional reaction to the topic over the last week, 13.8.13-20.8.13.

And when looking at the community’s reaction to their Behaviour:

The software tells us the volume of data that has been collected, the overall feeling/sentiment towards the candidate and how passionate people are when they mention either Kevin Rudd or Tony Abbott in Social Media:

Showing us that overall Tony Abbott had more coverage in Social Media, however, the sentiment was very negative and voiced with more passion than Kevin Rudd’s coverage, as illustrated in the following graphs:

I could go on and on about the data and insights that this software provides, but I won’t do it all at once. This has just been a taster. I’ll be posting more blogs over the next few weeks as we move towards the election on 7 September, and then when the results are announced.

Please stay tuned and share this blog with anyone you think might be interested in Social Media Analytics, Marketing or the Election.

25/8, Part 2: http://bit.ly/18SQXUR.

1/9, Part 3: http://bit.ly/1cuKRfe

5/9, Part 4: http://bit.ly/17GOz2v

9/9, Part 5: http://bit.ly/18OWbz5

If you’d like to know more about SAP Cloud for Social Media Analytics by NetBase software, have a look at this link: www.sap.com/socialanalytics, if you’d like to know more about the SAP Cloud portfolio, have a look at: www.sapcloudapps.com, or if you’re in Australia or New Zealand and you’d like to speak to someone, email us or ring Australia 1800 287 727 / NZ 0800 300 727.

The information displayed in this blog is presented in summary fashion and is intended for informational use only.  The information is derived via linguistic analysis of media and internet content not under the control of SAP Australia; it is presented “as is” and may not be accurate, complete, current or useful. The information does not reflect the views of SAP Australia or any SAP employee or contractor. Neither SAP Australia nor any of its related bodies corporate is liable for any claims, costs, damages or liability arising from the use of or reliance on the information.