Chapter 5 Manage Web & Social Media with Analytics

1. Competitive Intelligence Analysis

Competitive Intelligence (CI)
 Collecting, analyzing and distributing intelligence about products, customers,
competitors, and any aspect of the environment.
 Understanding about what is happening outside the business.
 Specific information about competitors.
 Help in anticipating and facing challenges.

Complete Competitive Intelligence

Industries
- Manufacturing
Markets Products - Healthcare Vendors Customers Competitors
- Retail
- Education

Some sources of information used in a competitive intelligence study:

 Press analysis = News analysis
 Pricing research
 Competitor interviews
 Customer interviews
 Company websites

2. Press Analysis
 Publicly available information
o Headline financial figures. (Financial Reports)
o Changes of key personnel (CEO & Senior management)
o Marketing analysis of competitors.
 E.g. Track advertisements (ads) placed over a period of time, on publications’
advertising rates to estimate competitor’s advertising budget.
3. Pricing Research
Involves checking websites, price lists.
Prices of competitors’ products and services.
Benchmarked against one’s own prices.
Competitor pricing research
o Difficult
o Valuable
o Expensive
 The key reason for this is that pricing models are increasingly complex.

4. Competitor Interviews
 Gaining competitor insights:
o Sources: Senior Management & Marketing VPs
 Gaining cooperation with such groups is considerably not easy.
 Agency can avoid revealing the sponsor of the survey, a financial incentive may gain
cooperation.
 Sales Managers can also be an extremely useful source of:
o Information on current products, new innovations
o Overall strategies and a leads to the other topics.

Speaking a Variety of Competitors

  Asking a competitor to provide details on their own business is not easy,
 So…
 Ask them to talk about other market players is more easily achieved.

5. Customer Interviews
 Effective, reliable or valuable source of info.
 Buyers will not say what they want or complain.
o But they buy elsewhere if requirements are not fulfilled.
 Customers display a remarkable level of ‘truth’.
o when talk about sellers, even have close and collaborative relationship.
o Issues - Price, Service, and Product information.

6. Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment
 Attitude towards an event or situation or an opinion.
 Sentiment = feelings
o Attitudes; Emotions; Opinions
 Measure tone of large volumes of conversations.
 Subjective impressions, not facts.
 For/Against, Like/Dislike, Good/Bad.

i. Positive Snippet (extract) :

 POSITIVE terms > Negative terms
ii. Negative Snippet:
 Negative terms > Positive terms
iii. Neutral Snippet:
 NO Positive NOR Negative terms
iv. Ambivalent snippet:
 Positive terms = Negative terms
Examples:

7. Questions that can be answered

Answers indication on factors such as; pricing, specifications, competition, others.
 Is this product review positive or negative?
 Is this customer email satisfied or dissatisfied?
 How are people responding to this ads campaign/product release/news item?
 How have bloggers' attitudes about the president changed since the election?
 Identifying child-suitability of videos based on comments.
 Bias identification in news sources.
 Identifying (in)appropriate content for ad placement.
 Why aren't consumers buying our laptop?
8. Cross Domain Applications
 Insights and applications from Sentiment Analysis have been useful in other areas as
well:
o Politics/political science
o Law/policy making
Sentiment Analysis: Politics

Sentiment Analysis: Malaysia

  Insights and applications from Sentiment Analysis have been useful in other areas
o  Politics/political science
 o Law/policy making
o Sociology (e.g. divorce, single…)
o Psychology
https://www.slideshare.net/MeroShana/suicide-psychiatry

9. PSYCHOLOGY: Suicide

10. Sentiment Analysis

  Opinion Mining
 Determine attitude of
o Speaker’s judgment or evaluation,
o Writer’s affective (emotional) state
o Readers’ intended emotional communication.

https://lct-master.org/files/MullenSentimentCourseSlides.pdf