Data-centric architecture of digital newsrooms use social media algorithms to convert big data into big page views and higher user engagement, says Preeti M Surya, HOD, Department of Journalism and Mass Communication

Analytics tools are the radar at digital newsrooms. Adobe’s Omniture has helped editors train algorithms to generate page views. The twin goal posts of page views and user-engagement are the daily battles editors in digital newsroom fight and win, celebrating every benchmark they hit. On a news heavy day, the page views set the goalpost of new targets to chase the following day, the following week and the following month. Page view graphs clearly point at outwardly expanding logarithmic spiral.

Web 2.0 to Augmented Analytics, Artificial Intelligence

Data centric architecture that responds to the dashboards of analytics software is the order of the day. With the onset of Web 2.0 and the democratization of content that unleashed with it, the stage was set for social media. Social media analytics is the obvious sequel to the digital saga…and the progression continues from social media to aggregators/ apps and beyond. Augmented analytics and artificial intelligence are the next disruptions the content generators across digital platforms are calibrating themselves to.

So is social media analytics only about big data? Does it only entail developing informatics to mine, monitor, interpret, summarize and may be graphically display the findings?

In case of newsrooms Omniture dashboard did pretty much the same.

Among the questions analytics tools answers are:

  • what are the top stories of the hour, peak time and off peak time
  • what is the navigation route of the viewers
  • where are the peaks and troughs
  • where is the traffic generated from- geographically as well as demographically
  • how the content must be matched with peak page views to generate an upward graph of page views and user engagement

The editorials’ magical ability to convert big data into big page views and even bigger user engagement is a skill worth acquiring. Enterprise resource planning, search engine optimization, social media optimization all steer the newsroom planners to leverage content management systems.

What is the USP of social media analytics tools and more significantly how are they relevant for businesses that are looking at leveraging social media to generate growth. How is social media analytics used to generate continual traction on the interface? And most significantly, how does big data translate into big page views or big social action symbolised by shares, retweets, likes and comments?

At the outset it is pertinent to state that social media analytics is aimed at underscoring useful patterns and harvesting intelligence that can further be deployed to cause growth.

Accor Case Study

A case study of Accor hospitality set in the post 2009 recession effectively demonstrates how the power of social media analytics aligns the online environment to the growth targets of an organization. In 2012, Accor hospitality with over 4000 properties across 90 countries looped in Synthesio, a social media research and monitoring company to turn the tide. Synthesio developed a tool to gauge the online reputation of 12000 hotels and compared the pain & gain points of the customers of Accor and its competitors. In addition to fixing the offline issues shared by the online community, Synthesio designed a rewards and training program incentivizing customers to connect with hotel in the online environment to share feedback. The data so mined was analyzed and put to use. Within one of this exercise, Novotel brand of Accor group logged in 55% spike in good reviews and a significant drop in the adverse comments.

Sodexo Case Study

Sodexo’s #solowithsodexo online campaign is another and more recent case study to gauge the impact of mobilizing online community. The online campaign that roped in a Delhi based travel blogger- Devesh Joshi lasted a mere 8- days and posted a reach of 20,000; generated

11616 click-through. The objective of the campaign was to add new dimension to the age old image of Sodexo being a paper voucher company. The pre-buzz campaign included #SolowithSodexo adventure. Devesh on a motorbike trip across Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala leveraged instagram posts and vlogs on the youtube to recast the bond between the brand and the millennials.

The Next Spiral on Social Media Graph

The following statistics clearly reflect where the next spiral on the social media landscape is emerging from:

· Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are the first, third, and tenth most-trafficked sites on the Internet

With the second-highest smartphone penetration in the world, India is one of the highest digital data consumption society. India posts the highest average data usage per smartphone.  The digital divide argument is losing power in post-Jio India. As per the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, Internet users in the country are up eight times between May 2014 (65.3 mn) and May 2019 (581.51mn). Google projections highlight 400 million active internet users in India with an average of 40 million users being added each year. Interestingly, over 50% of Google’s searches are coming from non-metro cities!