World Cup Social Media Analytics – How We Did It

Posted by Patrick Husting, June 14, 2010

A good colleague of mine over at Microsoft, Bruno Aziza, gave me a call on a Sunday night to discuss Extended Results partnering with Microsoft on the development of a World Cup Social Media Analytics web page.   Bruno chose us because we have technologies to capture the social conversation going on along with the advanced visualizations we do in Microsoft SilverLight.  I told Bruno, where do we sign up!  Check outwww.extendedresults.com/worldcup for the demo.

We started the project about 7 days ago with Microsoft using our Social Media Server solution to provide some insight into World Cup 2010.   Within just a couple days using our existing Social Media Server solution, we were able to capture over 800,000+ World Cup mentions in just 7 days!  Amazing…

There are many social media software solutions on the market basically all competing for your marketing dollars.   We took a completely different approach to the space in that we believe all this information needs to be captured and stored within a companies enterprise database and tied to other ERP solutions (CRM, Financial, Marketing, Competitive, etc).   Having the information stored within a SQL database, we can create laser sharp focused results out of the social media data, whenever we want, and tie it to business performance objectives.  Powerful…

The below diagrams will give you some insight into the process of capturing World Cup social mentions and providing the insight on our web site using our and Microsoft’s technologies.

GRAB THE DATA

• We started by identifying all the World Cup teams and Players that we wanted to track and entered those keywords into our Social Media Server admin tool.   Our server tool then continuously pulls from the major social media web sites and a predetermined set of blogs and matches those keywords and pulls a rich subset of that conversation and posts it to our SQL database.

DATA MINE FOR INSIGHTS

• Once we started capturing all the data, we started writing queries to summarize the results into summary tables.  The reason we did this was because we are adding about 100,000+ new World Cup mentions a day.  We actually used Microsoft Access for a bunch of ad hoc querying because it was so easy to use.  You didn’t have to be a SQL developer to write complex scripts, a business user could use MS Access.
• Once we got a summary tables completed, we wrote a data web service using Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 (C#).   We created a set of web service methods that our SilverLight client could call to get its data.

VISUALLY RICH DISPLAY

• Now the best part.   For the past couple of years, we have been using Microsoft SilverLight for many of our business intelligence projects because we can provide a deeper insights with graphical representations of the data.   We used Microsoft Expressions Blend to built out our graphical objects and then passed the XAML to the C#/SilverLight developers (Matt and Steve) and watched them crank out the specific report views below.  Took them all of one day to build it out including the web data service!  They are the Best!

We have discovered all kinds of interesting social media facts around World Cup 2010 and will have some later blog posts on them.   Just think of what you could do bringing technologies like these into your company.  They can provide very valuable insights in what your customers are saying about your company and enhance business performance.

You can find out more about our Social Media Analytics solution atwww.extendedresults.com