Social media and opinion mining: The brand new age of marketing

Facebook. Twitter. YouTube. These social media networks have been all the rage these past few years. Haven’t we heard enough? There is no denying their stronghold on marketing. Ignoring it would be equal to turning down an opportunity to use these networks strategically as marketing tools. These platforms are not just for teenagers.

An understanding of this has done much to convince the European Commission to prioritise research projects centred on such forms of communication, where everyone is involved in public relations and where your brand is the sum of a multitude of conversations.

One such project funded under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), the EU’s main funding instrument on research in science and technology, deals with this.

This project, PR2.0, will produce an integrated web tool that allows for centralised control of all of a company’s social media promotional activities as well as for tracking its reputation online. An easy-to-use social media campaign management tool, this application will create a centralised, effective management of a company and a brand’s reputation online combined with a tool to administer proactive social media campaigns.

The technology lying behind PR2.0 is a modular system in software architecture. It is an intelligent system with semantic and stylistic analysis and search algorithms which reduce the effort the user requires to take advantage of the application.

It is scalable, because the process capacity required to work with all the content constantly generated on social media sites is unrealistic.

Therefore a blackboard system will be adopted to coordinate the work of crawling and extracting information from different servers to allow the system to grow in process capacity as the number of users or the amount of information grows.

Aimed at small and medium enterprises, this project is highly relevant to Malta. With such a big boom in online social networking, the project’s aim is to develop a platform to assist SMEs in making the most of these tools, while keeping costs as low as possible. Because of the growth of social media, social marketing is not far behind and getting in early on mining data for this purpose is an opportunity to enter this market and ride this growth. Thus, social media is a perfect place to gain important information first hand on your company image and product acceptance.

This project, costing just over €1 million and spread over two years, involves five partners, one of which is Malta Industrial Innovation for SMEs (MIIS), which is a research centre based in Malta that assists local SMEs to compete in a globalised economy.

MIIS has been working on EU-funded projects since the Fifth Framework Programme. They are currently developing proposals for an ICT project on augmented reality and they are also submitting a proposal on renewable energy under the thematic area of energy. In the meantime, they are in the process of commencing two new projects, NUTRI-STAT to test soil chemicals for agriculture, and CHAMELEON a low power, image stitching surveillance camera.

Their skills in software development and their experience in data mining have encouraged them to take on a role in PR2.0. As such projects increase links with other companies in the field of EU funding, it has helped MIIS gain experience and pinpoint ways to succeed and profit from EU funding, and has also resulted in the improvement of their skills and services.

The Malta Council for Science and Technology (MCST) is the designated national contact point organisation for the FP7 and assists project partners such as MIIS. For further details on the FP7 contact MCST at fp7.mcst@gov.mt.

Ms Tonna is an FP7 executive at the Malta Council for Science and Technology. Mr Turner is an executive at MIIS.