In a newly-formed partnership with NetBase, a solutions leader in social media analysis, Localspeak will be utilizing the firm’s Natural Language Processing (NLP) Engine to better leverage social brand insights for market researchers, product managers, market and product innovators, and consumer insight specialists.

While many businesses have been using social media primarily to monitor brand “buzz” for a quick read on sentiment, this “traditional” analysis of sentiment has proven to be flawed by the low accuracy levels — under 50 percent by most estimates — of first generation technologies. The NLP engine from NetBase represents a major leap in accurate analysis and automatic content scoring within the social media universe. Not only can the engine determine, with 80 percent accuracy, brand sentiment, but also provide deeper insight into opinions and emotions. Highly scalable, the NetBase engine can access a massive, always-on index containing 12 months of social media content; it also retrieves insights in mere seconds from 95 billion social forums, on an unlimited number of brands.

Utilizing the NetBase platform enables Localspeak to provide market researchers, advertising agencies, brand managers and innovation consultants with more valid sentiment analysis, which may prove a stepping stone into deep-dive analysis of underlying opinions, emotions and behaviors. The end result of deeper analysis is better reporting, beyond mere buzz measurement, to drive better business decisions.

The NetBase platform differentiates itself from the competitors with the ability to analyze context — as opposed to the simple word-matching algorithms. Rather than calculating word frequency or analyzing text, the firm’s NLP engine reads sentences, evaluates grammatical sentence patterns, and organizes results to be fully-searchable on a wide variety of attributes.

In partnership with NetBase, Localspeak now can deliver truer analysis of social media, thus creating better value for market research professionals who wish to conduct quick social media market research or netnography, or prefer to take a preliminary cost-effective “first look” prior to designing an expensive and comprehensive market research study. We are also able now to provide brand managers and marketing professionals with better analytics for tracking social brand health, which results in enhanced messaging and strategic planning decisions. Through better insights reporting and analytics, product innovation and development professionals can gain new product ideas, and public relations professionals can augment social listening strategies by spot-checking issues for deeper understanding and historical trending.

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A market research firm approached us with a print advertising campaign for a major food brand which had been created for its biscuit product. The ad featured several descriptions of the product and its use, but only one photo: the biscuit itself.

In view of the fact the product was not associated with any specific recipe or daily meal, consumer response was problematic. Those surveyed responded that they had a hard time relating to the product and that they felt no urge to make a purchase. Survey questions also asked consumers how they would use the product, where they would serve it and, if they could, what persona the product brought to mind. Survey analysis proved beneficial to the client, who then was able to discern whether or not the print ad campaign was a) targeting the appropriate group and b) conveying the correct message.

Nearly 90% of those consumers surveyed noted the product’s convenient use and ease in preparation. Consumers also pointed out the versatility of the product, noting that it could be prepared and served at any time and for any meal.

The consumer personification of the product indicated that it placed well into the “family friendly” genre. Nearly 80% of those surveyed identified the product with such a family member as grandmother or parent. The product’s persona was defined as dependable, also indicating that it was user-friendly and reliable in quality time and again.

Tzu-Chein Chen joined Localspeak as a coding associate in 2008. Handling in-language coding for English, French and Chinese, as well as Chinese and French verbatim response translations, her recent projects include Chinese to English translation for a Delta Airlines advertising campaign, and French coding for PayPal.

Tzu-Chein began her professional career, working in the financial industry at SEI Investment as a Mutual Fund analyst. In addition to her Localspeak duties, she also now serves as JP Morgan Chase Performance analyst. She is fascinated by the analytical process of assigning alpha numeric values to survey response data and being able to derive useful analytics, which allows various languages across the world to be analyzed in a systematic way with a uniformed presentation.

A graduate of Drexel University, she earned her Bachelors of Science degree in Economics and Political Theory, with a minor in French. She studied French throughout high school and college, where she also studied at Ecole Supérieure du Commerce Extérieur.