Extracting Actionable Insights from the Internet: Why it's more important than ever
The internet is a treasure trove of invaluable information businesses must harness in order to uncover the latest industry and product trends, identify emergent customer desires and concerns, and form actionable insights they can translate into increased profit and ROI. However, trawling the vast ocean of online digital information is a complex undertaking.
Information Overload
With a vast amount of data available on the internet, it's easy for businesses to become overwhelmed. Sifting through this sea of information to identify relevant data can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. According to Forbes, "90% of the data in the world has been generated over the last two years", much of that spread across various platforms such as Reddit, TikTok, and Youtube.
Trendspotting is expensive
A study in the Journal Springer Nature indicated that User Generated Content (UGC) held "significant value for marketing managers. UGC allows them to easily gain insights into consumer attitudes, preferences, and behaviors.”
Identifying emerging trends requires tracking various sources spread across many fragmented channels, such as social media platforms, industry forums, and news websites, each of which requires a unique workflow to navigate in order to review its content, presenting a time-consuming challenge for already stretched human staff, who need to sift through all this unstructured, multimodal information to find even a nugget of insight.
Compounding this problem is the real-time nature of the internet, which is adding more noise into the mix every second. It is very easy to miss a trend or opportunity before it has changed or been mined by competitors already, and it is very difficult for staff to work through all the noise and predict and capitalize on future trends effectively.
You can't afford to wait…
Beyond needing to predict future opportunities for profits, businesses also have to be on the lookout for future potential negative sentiment around their existing products and services. Brands risk exposure to threats, such as negative reviews, reputational damage, or intellectual property infringement, which can go unnoticed in the vast ocean of online data until they go viral in an instant. Negative UGC can take the form of social media video posts on TikTok and Youtube, any of which can instantly become viral and destroy a company's reputation before they even know what people are saying or have a chance to respond to it. Accurately identifying and categorizing these expressions of customer sentiment can be difficult, and often requires advanced text analysis and natural language processing techniques staff can be hard-pressed to employ on limited time and cost budgets.
…but can you afford to act?
Video-based UGC makes this challenge even greater, considering that many videos can take significant amounts of time to watch in order to grasp their full content and intent. (Per The Verge, “A recent report from the Pew Research Center discovered that the average length of a video among the top 250,000 channels was between 13 and 14 minutes. Coming across a 30-minute video isn’t out of the ordinary. In fact, it’s become the new normal.”) That’s only about 32 videos per 8-hour shift for a full-time human employee to look at, not including any time for breaks or analysis. This is a problem that is unscalable for any human workforce, and it is only going to increase with time.
Detecting these threats and taking timely action is essential to maintain your company's reputation and competitive edge. By using the latest technologies, methodologies, businesses can effectively harness the power of AI and the internet to drive growth and success without incurring extra costs in time or human labor.