WebFOCUS links business, social data in one screen

12 years ago

Executives and front line workers get the benefit of viewing social media data and related business information on one screen with a new analytics tool launched by business intelligence and analytics software vendor Information Builders.

The company’s WebFOCUS Social Media Analytics software collects data from various social media interactions and presents them alongside information from a user’s existing database of sales, marketing, product quality and other customer centric data to provide companies with a better understanding of how what impact their brand or campaign is making in the social media arena.

A number of Canadian firms such as Scotiabank and International Financial Data Services, are WebFOCUS customers but not yet using the social analytics solution..

“With WebFOCUS, Facebook, Twitter and other social media channels become vital sources finding out what customers are thinking and talking about a company’s product or service against what your actual sales numbers are,” according to Jake Freivald, VP of marketing for Information Builders. “Typically users need to access separate screens to view these data, but we bring them together for easy viewing and correlation.”

“The product provides users with a tool to better understand of how big data relates to social media,” he said.

The software is ideal for retail companies, financial corporations and even law enforcement agencies, he said. The product can be configured to provide different types and levels of information depending on the user’s role.

For instance, Freivald said, a call centre representative may be interacting with customer through that individual’s social media account and have access to the customer’s client file as well.

WebFOCUS screen on retail and grocery firm’s meat campaign

“It’s very easy to identify a caller as a ‘complainer’ when we see regular negative tweets about a company’s product from that person,” Freivald said. “However, a quick check with that person’s client account could reveal that he or she is a loyal customer.”

The representative, he said, could identify the call as an opportunity and even pass the complaints about the product to the product development department.

Higher up the ladder, WebFOCUS can provide macro and micro data focus for executives. For instance in illustration above which is a WebFOCUS screen from a retail and grocery company’s meat campaign, the upper left chart shows social media sentiment represented in blue bars for positive sentiments, pink for negative and purple bars for neutral sentiments. The upper right charts show meat product sales at the top chart and social media likes in the bottom chart.

The lower right word cloud shows the most popular social media words associated with the campaign. The Lower left chart show the Twitter trends throughout the span of the campaign.

“A marketing or business executive can see from the upper right chart that meat sales were high at the onset of the campaign but slide down even as social media awareness grew,” Freivald said. “This could be an opportunity to investigate what went wrong and what went right and by clicking on the specific entries on the world cloud, users can find out what customers were actually saying.

WebFOCUS is competing with similar products offered by business intelligence and analytics stalwarts such as SAP AG, MicroStrategy Inc., Business Objects SA and Salesforce.com

WebFOCUS is being offered as an on-premise install rather than a cloud deployment because most customers are using it in conjunction with their existing databases.