Why we created SocialNuggets.Net? Technology behind our analytics on smartphones

SocialNuggets delivers real time market intelligence for fast moving industries by analyzing data from various social media sources. Our mission is to liberate social media data and sentiment analysis for use in real time research of brands, products and features.

This blog post discusses the following:

• Changing landscape of marketing research
• Current approach
• Technology requirements
• How does SocialNuggets work?
• Summary

Changing landscape of market research

In the fast moving markets like smartphones, tablets, apparel and entertainment, traditional market research techniques like surveys and focus groups are just too slow and can’t be relied upon exclusively to make effective business decisions.  Today, most consumers express their opinions voluntarily on various forums, blogs, review sites and social networking sites. This data, if mined correctly, is a goldmine of consumer sentiments and opinions and can serve as a source of real time market intelligence and that  has been a missing piece in the market research area despite many advances in technology.

Current Approach

There are many enterprise software packages available that can be customized with lots of efforts and resources to get the right answers for a particular industry/company. Needless to say, this is expensive, time consuming, generally offered as an enterprise software behind firewall and not affordable even for many large companies.

Technology Requirements

In order to analyze this vast amount of Internet data we call social data, one needs the following tools and technologies

• Focused Harvesting
• Text Analytics
• Natural Language Processing
• Sentiment Analysis

As an example, we analyze over 1M conversations quarterly on the web related to smartphones, get rid of spam using our technology and then extract sentiments by

• Features (like long battery life is positive while long charging time is negative)
• Phone models (like HTC EVO, Apple iPhone 4)
• Brands (like HTC, RIM, Samsung, Sony Ericsson)
• Category (Android, Blackberry, iPhone, Windows Phone)

Our technology, developed over 20 man-years of effort, has been used by many companies for marketing research, customer service, lead generation and brand management.

How does SocialNuggets work?

In order to make our technology accessible to companies of all sizes with least amount of upfront investment, we have started SocialNuggets.net that provides detailed research from social media in various forms as following:

Individual nuggets that anyone can consume by embedding inside of their websites or forwarding to their friends and colleagues – this is free so long as you maintain attribution to SocialNuggets and/or Our partners

Monthly and Quarterly SocialNuggets Index for various markets which can also be used to make purchasing decisions

Data behind individual nuggets that can be purchased for internal analysis

Full data warehouse for internal analysis by companies’ internal business analytics package

Reports and Customized research reports created by our staff/our partners

Summary

We have started this site with research on smartphones and are adding new nuggets daily for anyone in this industry to consume, enjoy, share and engage in making fast but smarter business decisions.

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In light of App Stores, Do Mobile Operators have a role to play in the Mobile VAS market?

It is widely believed that with the success of Apple App Stores and launch of new App Stores from all of the handset manufacturers, mobile operators have no role to play in VAS markets. (For the purpose of this article we will only look at applications that need data channel whether it is GPRS, EDGE or UMC and specifically exclude WAP and SMS type services.) The statement above has different applicability depending on the type of handsets and the markets.

The pricing for any data applications = Application subscription fee (one time or monthly) + data charges.

As long as mobile operators hold the key to data charges they will continue to have a role to play in the Mobile VAS market.

For  Android, Blackberry,iPhone,  and Windows Mobile phones, mobile operators have much less control because:

• Generally some minimum data bandwidth is included with the basic service and so leverage of data pricing from mobile operator is non-existent
• Users of these phones tend to be more savvy about uploading apps over the air and using it
• Users of these phones are more likely to own a credit card; a currency for buying from App Stores

In addition, mobile operator have very little leverage in markets where:

• Aggressive unlimited data plans have been offered like in the US where $20 buys you unlimited data plan on most phones
• SMS spamming of users by the operator is not acceptable like in the US and some Western European markets
• WAP portals of mobile operators never really attracted a whole lot of attention from its users like in case of AT&T in the USA

So, is there any market where mobile operators have leverage? Look at the case of a photo and video sharing application on a Nokia N Series phone. If a user uploads about 20MB worth of media a month and is charged per MB, the cost adds up and user is unlikely to use the app from Nokia’s Ovi App Store when their monthly bill arrives or when their pre-paid account dries out. This is where an operator can offer a zero rated plan and charge a fixed price for the app irrespective of the data usage.

Bottom line is mobile operators can continue to play a role in VAS markets where:

• They can control and bundle data and app pricing in a unique way
• When the app extends to wider phone types and choices beyond iPhone, Blackberry and Windows Mobile. Examples include Nokia Series 60, Series 40, Sony Ericsson and others
• Credit cards are not readily available and Pre-paid is the dominant platform as operators can act as currency brokers
• Can access and get their users to act in a cost efficient way like SMS and WAP
• Mobile operators subsidize handsets and can bundle any app wherein discovery problem can be addressed inexpensively

So before pundits declare death of operator VAS markets they need to look at each individual market before making a generalized statement based on iPhone App Store or only the US market.

I invite you to share your experiences from different markets here for others to learn from!

R. Paul Singh

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