ABOUT RIGHTPOINT

Rightpoint is a full service technology and user-experience consulting firm. Rightpoint’s core practice areas focus on assisting organizations with collaboration, social computing, intranets, extranets, web, enterprise communication, end-user engagement, and content management solutions with SharePoint. With a history of thought leadership and innovation, our team delivers high quality solutions that address complex challenges.

PROBLEM

Social media is an increasingly apparent topic in the world of technology, and strategies on how businesses can capitalize on its value are constantly developing. Twitter, being one of the leading social media tools used today, allows users to post text-based messages that often include metadata. Without the right tools, this data just sits on Twitter; however, by doing an analysis of Twitter feeds, this raw data can be processed into knowledge in a variety of ways. Based on how people tweet and the manner of which people tweet, analysis can be performed to view how the general public views and reacts to trending issues/topics at hand.

Taking advantage of data that is as accessible as tweets and processing it is essential for analyzing the public perception of a company (i.e. how their products are being used, how people react to company changes, etc.). With Analytics for Twitter, a company can track their performance from the public standpoint by creating knowledge from ad hoc analyses of tweets by the day, time of day, user, topic, and tone. This way, when a new product is introduced, a company can just go to Twitter to

perform an query on a specific topic and analyze the tone of each tweet.

This form of competitive intelligence will allow business executives to make informative decisions on making product changes based on public perception, as well as compare their company activity to a competitor’s on Twitter.

SOLUTION

Analytics for Twitter allows users to search Twitter and create dashboard views on Tweet statistics inside Microsoft® Office Excel 2010 with PowerPivot. Users can use any combination of search terms, including #hashtags, @mentions, @users, and keywords to search Twitter using their documented APIs, perform comparative analysis on tweets, as well as depict the tone of the tweets using a customizable tone dictionary of terms. The workbook comes with several sheets that provide insights into the query terms:

• Topics sheet – based on your query, identify key topics and mentions, frequency of tweets by time of day, and top tweeters.

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• People – who are the positive and negative tweeters, top tweeters by day and mentions.

• Tone – using the custom tone dictionary, identify negative, neutral and positive tweets; visualize tone by day and top tweeters by tone.

• Details – dive into every tweet, filtering on key items.

• Tone Dictionary – customize your own words to determine positive, negative, or neutral tone. It’s fast and easy.

Analytics for Twitter has been designed to support up to 5 concurrent search queries on #hashtags, @mentions, keywords and Tweeters. The search operators' syntax follows Twitter Search syntax (see http://search.twitter.com/operators for a complete list). However, Twitter search queries are limited to the past 4 - 7 days and a maximum of 1500 tweets per day. Depending on your search query, you may be limited by the number of days returned and number of tweets. Additionally, the Tone Score used is calculated based off of the user-defined tone dictionary. This dictionary maps keywords to a tone index which is a sliding scale from very positive to very negative. Users can modify the dictionary to meet the needs of their specific search topic.

TECHNOLOGIES

Microsoft® Office Excel 2010 with PowerPivot – an easier way to help boost operational efficiency through creating visual BI solutions

and promoting collaboration within a Microsoft® SharePoint Server 2010-based environment

Twitter – a social media and microblogging tool designed to allow users to post text-based messages and follow other users according to the their interests

Analytics for Twitter – a PowerPivot tool made for creating dashboard views of tweets to use for making competitive intelligence decisions based on the public perception

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