Social Media Analytics is a perfect complement to traditional market research today. It is used by firms to gauge the success of their campaigns through responses recorded in social media. From Burger King’s campaign to deleting unwanted Facebook friends to Airtel’s campaign proclaiming ‘har ek friend zaroori hota hai’, social networking has become an important strategic initiative for any business campaign. In fact, politically too, Barack Obama generated much of its positive public opinion through this medium in last presidential elections. Naturally, this has led to introduction of various visualization tools to better understand the phenomenon of propagation of an idea in social mediums like Facebook,Twitter, or Youtube.We chose NodeXL as it as an open source extension which can be used in MS Excel, already a very popular choice of students/managers and even a beginner without any complex programming knowledge can source data from social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter.
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Screenshot of NodeXL
WHAT IS NodeXL?
The NodeXL Template for Microsoft Excel 2007 is a free and open source extension to the widely used spreadsheet application that provides a range of basic network analysis and visualization features. NodeXL uses a highly structured workbook template that includes multiple worksheets to store all the information needed to represent a network graph. Network relationships (i.e., graph edges) are represented as an “edge list”, which contains all pairs of vertices that are connected in the network. Other worksheets contain information about each vertex (i.e., node) and cluster. Visualization features allow users to display a range of network graph representations and map data attributes to visual properties including shape, color, size, transparency, and location.
NodeXL is designed to support students who are learning social media network analysis and professionals who are interested in applying network analysis to business problems. It builds on the familiar spreadsheet paradigm to provide an easy-to-use tool for nonprogrammers that allows a variety of visual properties, supports powerful filtering, calculates frequently used network metrics, and offers rich support for diverse visual network layouts. NodeXL includes powerful automated features, while allowing for manual control of individual vertex placement, labeling, color properties, and the like. NodeXL integrates metrics, statistical methods, and visualization to gain the benefit of all three approaches. The tool supports work with modest-sized networks of several thousand vertices, although some users have successfully dealt with tens of thousands of vertices.
DATA SOURCES:
NodeXL is very flexible and can retrieve data from either emails, twitter or facebook. It can retrieve the mails of a specific time period, of any person or a company, and can graphically show the frequency and statistics of the mails by directional network graphs. We will try to capture data from Twitter API and use it to demonstrate the features of the product.
How does NodeXL help in generating Business Value?
As mentioned earlier, visualizing through NodeXL can be used to determine patterns in social networks. The inferences drawn from analyzing a network through NodeXL can result in :
1) Creating relevant database directly from social networking site like Facebook and Twitter about products/services of the country
2) Gauging the impact of a new campaign.
3) Gauging the attitude of a social group towards a particular news or event.
4) Preferences and feelings of a social group to conceptualize a new product.
5) Determining the social behavioural profile of individuals and predict their behaviour pattern like late adopter, innovator or laggard.
6) Identify clusters and segments in a particular network.
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