The Social Newsroom: Visual Analytics for Social Business Intelligence

Abstract

Today, businesses are utilizing social media as part of their strategy for communicating with and understanding the behaviors of their consumers. The widespread public use of social media is a relatively new phenomenon that presents an ongoing, ever-changing challenge to companies and creates a unique set of risks as well as advantages to decision-makers. At the same time expansion into the online social space offers tremendous potential strategic advantages including demographic targeting from a new, pervasive reflection of consumers and brand advocates. Social media thus takes on a new relevance in forging relationships of brand co-creation. The research project, in its entirety, seeks to derive business value from social data by designing and developing a series of dashboards for those who struggle to interpret and keep up with the social data created around a brand and marketing campaign.

The following prototype demo demonstrates how the tool is theoretically informed (in a theory of social data), technically robust and sound (via visual analytics), methodologically rigorous (following Action Design Research), and empirically evaluated (in real-world campaigns and trainee evaluations). We first outline the foundation of tool development with focus on the main perspectives guiding the research. A presentation of the actual tool development is subsequently put forward highlighting the main components of the tool.