CASE STUDY: SPIRAL16
The Rise of the Social Consumer: A graphical representation
BACKGROUND
Spiral16, as the company states, “stands apart from other monitoring applications
because we work like a search engine, scouring and indexing the Web, not just social
media. Our human-‐guided data validation helps collect more relevant digital
content than anyone else and our 3D visual-‐mapping capabilities offer a unique
view of your brand or topic on the Web.”
Spiral16’s platform has three core attributes:
Focus on Relevant Data
The application is focused on bringing back relevant data — the details that are important for your particular brand or business. Spiral16′s proprietary web crawler collects more relevant digital content, so users don’t have to waste time sorting through outdated material and spam.
Comprehensive Monitoring
The Spiral16 platform is fundamentally different from other monitoring solutions. Spiral16 isn’t pulling from one vault of data — instead it continually gathers and correlates information from web pages on the Internet, checking against search engines and indexing RSS feeds at the same time.
3D Virtualization
Spiral16’s 3D Virtualization allows you to understand data at a glance, intuitively interpreting a visual snapshot of the data you are monitoring. It is also unique and effective presentation and reporting tool.
THE PIVOT PROGRAM
As part of a partnership between Spiral16 and Pivot, Pivot developed a set of analytical frameworks to understand what unique insights Spiral16 could deliver about the universe of social media
professionals that Pivot serves.
Working with Spiral16 data analysts, Pivot developed three informational sets to study: Part 1: Full Data Set, which covered a wide range of topics of interest to Pivot
Part 2: Social Consumer Data, which focused specifically on the topic of “the social consumer,” the primary content focus for Pivot 2011
Part 3: Brian Solis& Pivot Data, which focused on content closely related to Brian Solis, host and executive producer of Pivot and on Pivot itself.
Part 1: Full Data Set
Pivot tracked the Full Data Set from June 1, 2011 – October 13, 2011.
The program tracked 7 phrases: “social advertising,” “social marketing,” “social media analytics,” “social media measurement,” “social media solutions,” “social media tracking,” and the new, branded term “social consumer.”
Tracking was accomplished by doing an automated pull of websites, blogs, social content and other web information captured by the Spiral16 spidering technology. These automated data sets were then scrubbed by Pivot’s social media team.
The granularity of Spiral16 system allowed Pivot to see their rise and fall day by day of activity and other measures by each data set. Beyond activity, we could also track sentiment of each set day by day across the full 4.5 months:
One of the unique aspects of Spiral16, compared to many emerging analytics platforms which tend to focus exclusively on one aspect of content ( Tweets, Facebook actions, etc.) is that it spiders vast stretches of the web and social space. As a result, it was possible to also view all data by source. Here is an example of site types as sorted by proportion talking about the five phrases in this full social data set:
Spiral 16 also has powerful capabilities to expand a core set of phrase/concepts automatically into a broader semantic universe. This kind of conceptual magnification provides a path to seeing trends and relationships that might now otherwise be spotted. Here is the Semantic Cloud generated by Spiral 16 for this data universe, sorted by frequency of highest first:
One of the most unique capabilities of Spiral16 is in data visualization. Essentially any relationship among data in Spiral16 datasets can be rendered graphically. Here, for example, is a full visualization of all 5000 top influential pages identified in the Pivot project:
This cluster analysis shows visually the relevance relationships among these top influencer web pages. It is derived from all data and all queries for the last 60 days with 5000 most influential pages shown. One way to think of this is as a kind of visual representation of the web a what-Google-sees view of how web pages relate and influence one another.
From an analytic perspective, the most impressive thing about Spiral16 visualization is that they are far more than intriguing pictures. All of them have full, live data embedded within. The example below shows the date that resides behind one visual element:
Part 2: Tracking the Social Consumer
Here are examples of Pivot’s tracking of “the social consumer” during the Spiral16 project. Throughout the test period, the Social Consumer term (5%, 2698 URLs) had more volume than Social Media Tracking (4.43%, 2389 URLs).
This is a visualization of the data relationships for “Social Consumer” for the first 30 days of the project:
In these two graphics it is possible to literally see a rise in intensity and focus around this phrase. The second visualization shows now only many more date points, but also tighter clustering. The market, in short, is beginning to settle on what it has to say about “social consumers.”
In the Social Consumer query—the branded term for the conference – we found 2,698 URLs Solis mentioned in Social Consumer query: 300 URLs
Pivot Conference mentioned in Social Consumer query: 302 URLs Brian & Pivot mentioned in Social Consumer query: 222 URLs
Part 3: Brian Solis & Pivot
The terms “pivot,” solis,” “pivotcon,” “briansolis” were not used as key query terms. Rather, this part of the study was looking at the Internet ecosystem of social terminology without filters to see the amount of traction that Pivot and Solis had gained in those relevant posts from across the web.
Across all 7 social term queries…
Solis is mentioned across 2% (1,096 URLs) of all queries Pivot is mentioned in 1.3 % (704 URLs) of all social term queries Brian & Pivot are mentioned in .66% (353 URLs) of all queries
In studying the web and social related to Brian Solis and Pivot, the data universe was much sparser, but as the two graphics below show, here, too a clear pattern of increase in mentions and tighter clustering can be seen.
First two months:
The next virtualization layout depicts the reach of the Pivotcon home page and it’s connection with url’s throughout the social media ecosystem.
Sprial16 allowed for the visualization of Pivot-Solis data sets and all the “social consumer” data together in one display. This illustrates how interrelated the conference is with Brian and the Social Consumer branding.
And here is a close-up showing the data behind one of the points in this visualization. Spiral16 is designed for deep dives: visualization to see patterns and then full data for context. The illustrated site is the center of a cluster of sites with content driven by this primary source.
WHAT WE LEARNED
Spiral16 is a unique and incredibly powerful platform for professional-grade analytics across the web. It has far broader data coverage than most emerging analytic platforms, covering the whole web as well as social and blogs. Spiral16 also has a different perspective than many other platforms, focusing much more on power and depth of analysis than friendliness or ease of use.
It reminded the Pivot team of Wall Street analytic systems. Given the data glut being generated by the increase in online consumer activity, a Wall Street-like system may be just what major players require.
