With advanced analytics at its fingertips, Liquid Newsroom has already been able to streamline its processes for surveying new information markets. By helping users follow suggestions and reach insights more quickly, the IBM solution helps to expand the company’s analytics horizons while saving significant amounts of time.
“Instead of spending a week or more on an initial market survey, we can cut through the chatter and get to the truly relevant data in just a few hours,” says Steffen Konrath. “That’s a time-saving of up to 95 percent for our analysts, and it means that we can start delivering insight to our clients in days, not weeks.”
He adds: “It’s quite beautiful that you can pull in social media data, upload your own data, and analyze everything all in one place. That’s a real breakthrough for usability.”
Communicating the findings to clients has also become considerably easier. The IBM solution automatically suggests appropriate ways to present each set of results, and generates visualizations within seconds.
“We particularly like the decision tree visualizations, which offer great clarity,” comments Steffen Konrath. “And it’s very simple to export them as presentations, so we can easily walk our clients through our findings and explain what we’ve discovered about their products and markets.”
Building on these early successes, the company has already started to expand its use of both Watson Analytics for Social Media and other cognitive technologies from IBM.
“The long-term vision is even more ambitious,” says Steffen Konrath. “We are already starting to use some of the IBM Watson® APIs to support better targeting. For example, we can use the Watson Personality Insights API to better understand individual information needs and see if our clients’ marketing content matches those requirements.”
Another intriguing possibility is to use IBM Watson Knowledge Studio and IBM Campaign software to automate the curation process by using machine learning techniques to “read” content, classify its themes, and push it automatically to appropriate channels—a process which is currently handled by Liquid Newsroom’s expert content analysts.
“There is always going to be a human element to content curation and targeting, but there is huge potential for cognitive computing to augment and accelerate our human capabilities,” concludes Steffen Konrath. “We see these IBM solutions as a key tool to help us deliver the most relevant, engaging content at an unprecedented scale—empowering brands to control their online narratives and reach new markets.”