SUMS – Social and everything else

Social networks have filled up the net in one form or another. Almost everybody around you might want to add you on Facebook, follow you on Twitter, share a picture with you on Flickr or Picasa, have you as a connection on LinkedIn and the examples could carry on endlessly.

If the social networks were initially only for individuals, we clearly now see that companies start to migrate their communication efforts this way as well. The advantages are numerous:

• there are no costs involved for joining a social network (at least not for the core features they provide)
• the company gets instant feedback from its customers (or potential customers)
• it helps the company to become more “customer oriented” and (in some cases) allows the customers to be involved in the making of a new product
• it might offer a company insights regarding the geographical areas where it has a bigger customer base
• it might help observe the competitors’ impact on certain markets and in different areas

However, if the metrics for the WEB 1.0 era when a company’s digital efforts were based only on its website were given by the number of visitors per day (and other factors as number of visited pages, average time for a visit, number of pages viewed per visit, etc.), there aren’t any WEB 2.0 metrics which could show to a marketing director what’s the impact of the company he/she works for. This is partly because companies’ use of social networks is a relatively new marketing technique and also because, given the fact that there is a multitude of social networks, there is no way to easily unify the social graphs they provide for a certain user and the impact a user has made globally.

This is where our project aims to make a change. By using the APIs provided by some of the most known social networks, we would like to develop a tool (we still don’t know its final form – web or desktop application) that would allow a user (be it an individual or a company) to analyse the connections and interactions between these social networks and also provide him/her with relevant data regarding:

• geographic location of “customers”/”fans”
• impact of a launched product or service (by analysing how many people have talked about it on different networks)
• products/services launched by competitors
• users’/customers’ profile

Throughout the posts that will follow you will be able to read about how our project evolves over time and how we will reach to a product (the application) from a sum of a ideas.

Keep calm and carry on!