Opinion Mining

Opinion mining is a type of natural language processing for tracking the mood of the public about a particular product.

Opinion mining, which is also called sentiment analysis, involves building a system to collect and categorize opinions about a product. Automated opinion mining often uses machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence (AI), to mine text for sentiment.

Opinion mining can be useful in several ways.  It can help marketers evaluate the success of an ad campaign or new product launch, determine which versions of a product or service are popular and identify which demographics like or dislike particular product features. For example, a review on a website might be broadly positive about a digital camera, but be specifically negative about how heavy it is. Being able to identify this kind of information in a systematic way gives the vendor a much clearer picture of public opinion than surveys or focus groups do, because the data is created by the customer.

There are several challenges in opinion mining. The first is that a word that is considered to be positive in one situation may be considered negative in another situation. Take the word “long” for instance. If a customer said a laptop’s battery life was long, that would be a positive opinion.  If the customer said that the laptop’s start-up time was long, however, that would be is a negative opinion. These differences mean that an opinion system trained to gather opinions on one type of product or product feature may not perform very well on another.

A second challenge is that people don’t always express opinions the same way. Most traditional text processing relies on the fact that small differences between two pieces of text don’t change the meaning very much.  In opinion mining, however, “the movie was great” is very different from “the movie was not great”.

Finally, people can be contradictory in their statements. Most reviews will have both positive and negative comments, which is somewhat manageable by analyzing sentences one at a time. However, the more informal the medium (twitter tweets or blog posts for example), the more likely people are to combine different opinions in the same sentence. For example: “the movie bombed even though the lead actor rocked it” is easy for a human to understand, but more difficult for a computer to parse. Sometimes even other people have difficulty understanding what someone thought based on a short piece of text because it lacks context.  For example, “That movie was as good as his last one” is entirely dependent on what the person expressing the opinion thought of the previous film.

• Sentiment Analysis and why it is important..

Mystery Shopping vs. Customer Satisfaction Surveys

When it comes to mystery shopping and customer satisfaction surveys, many companies are left wondering which option is right for them. Each has it’s own unique advantages that can be helpful in different ways. Because these look at different aspects of the experience, your business can use both to identify potential issues and improve store operations and the customer experience.

When considering mystery shopping vs. customer satisfaction surveys, it is important to understand how each one can contribute to your goals and help to refine your practices.

What’s Mystery Shopping?

If you could be in all of your locations monitoring what is going on at all times and coaching each location’s staff, you would know that things are being done right. Unfortunately, this is not realistic for big brands and even minor mistakes can negatively impact profits. So what’s the solution? Mystery shopping programs that allow eyes and ears to be everywhere you can’t.

Working with a mystery shopping company allows you to see what’s really happening in your store (as well as within each department, at the fitting rooms, at the register, etc.)  from an objective point of view. It is a valuable tool to ensure that all strategies are being properly executed at the store level, contributing to a consistent, on-brand customer experience.

A mystery shopping program will give you insight on the entire experience from the perspective of a typical customer, providing you with useful information about what is actually going on in your stores compared to what you think is or should be happening.

Uses & Benefits

When used effectively, a mystery shopping program can reveal the level of consistency in experience across all stores, increase conversion and UPT, as well as confirm behaviors or perceptions revealed through customer satisfaction surveys.

Along with mystery shopping comes plenty of benefits, including:

• Improved operational performance, maximized sales and a well executed customer experience.

• Specifically identified areas where further training or a change in procedures can improve your bottom line.

• Improved brand compliance and performance, differentiating your brand from competitors.

What Are Customer Satisfaction Surveys?

Every company is searching for the best way to enhance their in-store experience, but not everyone is utilizing the most powerful tool – your customers! Customers know what they do and, more importantly, don’t like about the experience they just had in your store, so why not ask them?

Customers are your most important asset and keeping them happy is a top priority. Customer satisfaction surveys help you to find out exactly what your shoppers expect and allow you to deliver just that. A happy customer can turn into a brand promoter, spreading the word to others about their great experience with your brand.

Customer satisfaction surveys can be done online or over the phone, but the most important step is taking the data and turning it into actionable results. Taking customer feedback and applying it to your brand objectives will improve customer experience and, ultimately, your brand profitability.

Uses & Benefits

Customer satisfaction surveys are great for discovering how your customers feel about your brand overall, as well as gauging their satisfaction in specific areas of their experience.

Gaining customer feedback through customer satisfaction surveys has many benefits, including:

• Giving your customers a voice, which builds trust in your brand.

• An opportunity for benchmarking and tracking progress through strategically timed surveys.

• Identifying those aspects of the experience that drive customer satisfaction.

What’s the Difference?

Typically, mystery shopping provides you with information about your stores’ strengths and opportunities, including overall appearance and organization, associates’ level of knowledge and customer service, product placement and signage.

The aim of mystery shopping is to check-up on how well individual stores are meeting defined company standards in areas that are measurable.

On the other hand, the best customer satisfaction surveys uncover sources of both satisfaction and dissatisfaction in the following areas:

• Expectations vs. perception

• Likelihood to recommend the store to friends

• Repeat purchase intentions

• Subjective opinion on the full customer experience

Why You Need Both

You will benefit from using both, as they can be tailored to one another for more targeted results. The results of customer satisfaction surveys can be used to revise mystery shopping standards, where needed. If customer feedback reveals the “what,” mystery shopping shows you the “why.” Satisfaction surveys can tell you that a customer was dissatisfied with the wait time, but not why. That is where mystery shopping can be helpful in conjunction with surveys, investigating issues and giving them some context.

Mystery shopping is the best option if your brand wants to be sure that every location is meeting company-wide standards while identifying strengths and weaknesses in defined areas. If you want to learn the sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction about your in-store experience straight from your customers, look directly to your customer satisfaction results.

Combining the results and insights from both programs will not only give you a more complete picture of the experience, but also provide a descriptive action plan to improve it.

• Pros and Cons of Mystery Shopping called out!.

How you can earn as a part of a crowd?

With the rapid rise of crowdsourcing over the last five years since the term was coined in 2006,  there has been a lot of coverage on how individuals, organizations and businesses can implement the concept into their work.

But what about the worker? Since crowdsourcing is making such a visible impact on the way work is done, how can professionals and creatives benefit from the crowdsourcing model? Here are ideas for participating on crowdsourcing sites for perks, prizes, and, yes, even income.

1. Work for Money

If you’re up for doing small tasks that other people might find tedious, this option may be a fit for you. Micro-labor means you often get paid pennies per piece of a task you complete. For example, you could choose an appropriate category for an extensive list of lodgings for a penny per answer. If you respond accurately to 500, you’ve made $5.00, if you do 5,000, you’ve made $50.

2. Pitch to Win Business

There are a number of specific opportunities for crowdworkers in the fields of design, marketing, writing, photography and video. One can coordinate and filter the crowd of experts. One gets creative briefs, and can pitch on creative work. One is not asked to do spec work, but instead submit a proposal or ideas.

3. Contribute Ideas

If you are good at coming up with ideas, you may want to try this alternative. Remember, there is no guarantee you will win, and you cannot “protect” the ideas you contribute.

Work may involve contests such as coming up with a new domain name for an IT business and developing a new brand name that incorporates a word specific to the value of that brand.

4. Enter a Design Contest

While there continues to be a debate about whether or not designers should participate in contests (which essentially lead to spec work), there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that it can be a great way to break into an industry or a market.

• Check out how you can utilize your free time and earn money through a mobile app here..
• Benefits of becoming a Mystery Shopper..

Importance of Sentiment Analysis

By using Social Media, your organization can learn what your customer truly thinks about you, your products and your services. A key component to your Social Media Analytics program should include understanding the point of view of the author of the post. You need to analyze whether the post is positive or negative.

Determining? Whether the opinion of a post is not easy, but technologies such as Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics, and Text Mining have made it a little easier. These technologies take care of the heavy lifting, making your Social Media Analytics process a little less consuming. It can be a consuming process.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) software endeavors to understand groupings of words to determine their meaning. In the case of Social Media Analytics, NLP tries to understand the sentiment of the word groups and rate them as either positive or negative. The problem comes in with understanding and ambiguity. Take for instance this simple example to help you understand one of the problems with NLP. Take the phrase The house is small. Is that a positive statement or a negative one? Well, it all depends on the reader and what you are looking for. NLP is not perfect, yet but with a little manual work it can get you to where you need to be. Social Media Analysis will for some time be a semi-automated process because there are some things that software just can’t figure out.

Still, the ability to understand sentiments is an important factor. Understanding sentiments help towards understanding the ROI of your Social Media initiatives. By setting a baseline of where your customer sentiments are today as collected through your Social Media Monitoring data-warehouse then over time watching how those sentiments improve can serve as a useful key performance indicator (KPI). Then you can tie the timing of the sentiment shift with sales for the same period and now you have a measure that most executives will appreciate.

As you continue you Social Media Analytics process do not forget to collect and benchmark the sentiments of social web participants.

– Do you have the ability to become a mystery shopper? Find out..

Visual Content Marketing

General Visual Content Stats

1) Researchers found that colored visuals increase people’s willingness to read a piece of content by 80%.

2) When people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later.

3) 46% of marketers say photography is critical to their current marketing and storytelling strategies.

4) 34% of marketers selected visual assets as their most important content, behind blogging (45%) and before videos (19%).

5) 65% of senior marketing executives believe that visual assets (photos, video, illustrations and infographics) are core to how their brand story is communicated.

6) Content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without relevant images.

7) Only 27% of marketers have a process in place to aggregate, organize, and manage the visual assets being used across their marketing teams.

8) 39% of marketers believe that more of their budget should be allocated to the acquisition or creation of compelling visual assets.

9) 73% of content creators plan to prioritize creating more engaging content in 2016, and 55% plan to prioritize creating visual content.

• Digital Data

Video Stats

10) 51.9% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI.

11) Shoppers who view video are 1.81X more likely to purchase than non-viewers.

12) Using the word “video” in an email subject line boosts open rates by 19%, click-through rates by 65% and reduces unsubscribes by 26%.

13) Midway through 2015, mobile video plays exceeded 44% — up 74% from 2014 and up a whopping 844% since 2012.

14) Between April 2015 and November 2015, the amount of average daily video views on Facebook doubled from 4 billion video views per day to 8 billion.

15) In July 2015, Periscope users were watching 40 years’ worth of videos every day.

16) In Q2 of 2015, mobile phones (34%) and tablets (15%) combined for 49% of video ad impressions — up from 38% in Q1 of 2015. Publishers saw PC impressions drop from 62% to 50% in the previous quarter. 

17) Syndacast predicts 74% of all internet traffic in 2017 will be video.

Infographic Stats

18) Eye-tracking studies show internet readers pay close attention to information-carrying images. In fact, when the images are relevant, readers spend more time looking at the images than they do reading text on the page.

19) Infographics are Liked and shared on social media 3X more than other any other type of content.

20) Infographics were the B2B content marketing tactic with the biggest increase from 2014 to 2015, up from 51% to 62%.

21) People following directions with text and illustrations do 323% better than people following directions without illustrations.

22) 60% of marketers predict the use of infographics will increase in 2016 compared to 2015.

Social Media Stats

23) Visual content is more than 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content.

24) Articles with an image once every 75-100 words got double the number of social shares than articles with fewer images.

25) 71% of online marketers use visual assets in their social media marketing.

26) B2C marketers place more importance on visual content than B2B marketers — and a whopping 40% of B2C marketers say visual content is the most important type of content.

27) Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than those without images.

28) Buffer reported that for its user base, tweets with images received 150% more retweets than tweets without images.

29) The Instagram community has grown to more than 400 million as of September 2015.

30) On Instagram, photos showing faces get 38% more Likes than photos not showing faces.

31) Organic engagement on Facebook more than doubled in 2015, while organic engagement on Instagram almost halved.

32) 52% of teens use Instagram, and nearly as many (41%) use Snapchat.

33) Snapchat has 100 million daily users, 65% of whom upload photos using the app. 34) Women continue to dominate Pinterest: 44% of online women use Pinterest compared with 16% of online men.

35) Shopify users referred by Pinterest spend an average of $80 compared to the Facebook referral average of $40.

36) Pins on Pinterest have viral potential: Over 80% of pins are re-pins compared to 1.4% of tweets retweeted.

37) 88% of consumers have purchased a product they pinned, and 49% have purchased 5 or more products they’ve pinned.