Evaluate your data asset through customer journey analytics

Corporate officials highlighted on a street explaining importance of real-time data

The secret to ongoing profitability are three little words “love your customer”. This is not just because of the purchases they make, but the behavioural data they leave behind. In the age of the data-driven business, this is where you will find insights that can be leveraged for acquiring new customers and maintaining existing ones.

You need to do whatever is necessary to keep existing customers on board. But when you have aggressive growth targets to meet, the only way to achieve meaningful uplift is by acquiring new customers. To succeed you need to be more creative in the way that you analyse your customer information and understand and utilise your data assets. Any one of your existing customers is a goldmine of information – if you know how to unlock and analyse the underlying data. Especially if you have the capability to analyse all of your customers’ behaviour.

Looking at the bigger picture, you can identify common trends and experiences that can be leveraged to attract new clients. By building cohorts of customers based on similar behaviours for instance, you can create marketing (and retention) strategies that are tailored to customer interests, preferences and behaviour profiles. Done properly, analytics can enable companies to reach that highly desired segment of one whereby each customer is understood and serviced as an individual.

Understanding your customer journey is critical to gaining insight into customer behaviour. In order to do this successfully you must understand the data footprints that illustrate customer journeys – only then will you be able to measure performance and success.

Marketers have long known that customer journeys are multi-stage affairs. But by performing advanced analytics on their data stores, the journey is shown to be made up of data footprints left by customers on their paths. Where the entire journey is digital, tools like Google Analytics make it very easy to identify and follow these footprints, tracking clicks and page navigation across your website.

But if your customer journey crosses multiple channels – online, phone, social media – it becomes more difficult to create an accurate, comprehensive oversight. Not least because each footprint will typically be recorded in a different system. You must have a way to query and aggregate each of these datasets to properly understand the various nuances of the journey.

 

What is customer journey mapping?

As we’ve already implied, customer journey mapping is the process by which customers go from brand new prospect, making a final purchase, ongoing consumption of the product/service, all the way through to the next buying cycle. In order to fully understand your customer’s journey you must also identify the data assets that document (or ‘record’) their experiences, decisions and behaviours.

Here at Idiro this is done by carrying out a deep-dive data asset discovery project to help identify what data assets are available within an organisation and how they might be used to drive value. Mining those data sets allows you to track customers across all of your channels, providing a granular view into every decision point and outcome. We then put these insights to work to understand which journeys are the most effective for achieving your commercial objectives; customer acquisition, customer value increase and customer retention.

Any business can perform a customer journey mapping exercise – even those still developing their analytics or customer management programs. All you need is access to skilled, experienced analytics experts, and their tried and tested methodologies.

Customer Journey Mapping diagram explaining the AIDA model


Moving beyond Post Its

The leap from journey map to actionable insight is not always so straight forward however. Sometimes your most valuable data asset is not the most obvious – in most cases it will be a correlation of multiple data sources.

All the data you need for behavioural analysis is available, but you may need specialist skills and tools to extract those insights and to perform data visualisation. Querying multiple data sets and collating results to piece together the fine details of the customer journey can be complicated – and potentially time-consuming.


Looking further afield

It may be that some of the data sets you identify exist outside your organisation. Examining these external sources of data can be difficult – especially when you don’t know exactly what you are looking for. Social media is a rich source of data relating to product/service experiences and referrals – but you need to know how to collect, aggregate and analyse relevant data.

The data asset audit of the journey map will also point you in the direction – you can then outsource the physical analytics tasks to experts like Idiro who have the tools and experience to analyse internal and external data sets.


Going social

Another source of data ripe for analysis is social media. With more than 2 billion active users who are sharing experiences, thoughts and glimpses of their everyday lives, Twitter is a great place to gain additional understanding of your target market because data is freely available to marketers for behavioural and intent analysis. And if you can begin matching social media profiles with contact names, you instantly gain a head-start on your sales leads.

Social media analysis also provides a way to gauge customer sentiment towards any subject of interest. This could be your brand, your products and services, or your competitors. Sentiment analysis provides another point on the customer journey map – and some insights on how to guide new prospects towards your brand.

Are people complaining about their current supplier for instance? Do they use negative language in their status updates? These are clear indicators of an unhappy customer – and an opportunity to poach them.

Once you have identified specific individuals (or similar groups of individuals) you can use your customer journey map to target messaging and draw them into your sales funnel.

Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram offer similar opportunities – assuming you have the right social media analytics in place. Or a suitably experienced data mining partner.


A worthy investment

Never assume that the cost of predictive analytics and customer journey mapping is too high, or that you can simply “muddle” your way through. Because after all, you are entering a market that has incumbents – and you are going to have to entice most of your customers away from them.

To do this you will need to expand your data horizons to include third party information. Doing so will enrich your understanding of your marketplace and the potential customers that inhabit it. Not only will you better connect with new prospects, but the behavioural insights will provide another part of the puzzle for understanding existing clients, allowing you to further refine your customer retention strategies.

Businesses are quickly realising that advanced analytics is a crucial tool for managing the customer journey, and using their own behaviour to provide a better quality of service – and to maximise revenue earning opportunities. Making better use of the data you have is vital to love your existing customer, and to help find new ones.

To learn more about advanced analytics and using third party data to enhance the accuracy and quality of the insights you generate, please call us now on +353 1671 9036

In-house vs outsourced – building an analytics function that hits the ground running

a man standing in front of a wall, looking at his options to outsource data analytics for his company
We live in a data-driven economy and failure to build a data analytics competence of some kind leaves you at a competitive disadvantage. And we know that businesses need to become much smarter about how they use data to retain or attract customers.

One of the first choices you face is how to build out your analytics function – do you want to build a team in-house, or partner with external experts, or even choose a hybrid model? This decision will have wide-ranging consequences for your ability to exploit your data in the future.

DIY data analytics

In theory, building your data analytics capability in-house has one major advantage – you can begin analysing your data almost immediately. Obviously, you will still need to deploy predictive analytics tools, but you can save time that would be otherwise spent identifying potential partners and agreeing service contracts.

But this course of action assumes you already have data science and analytics skills in-house. If not, you will need to hire suitably-skilled staff. And that’s where you start to run into delays and risks.

Paradoxically, you need data science experience in order to hire your first data scientist – otherwise you cannot properly evaluate their technical skills. It is also incredibly important to realise that you cannot simply bolt data science onto existing operations – you must change your culture to be able to act on the insights being generated by your data science team. Too often, businesses make this mistake and never realise the full potential of their investment.

Expensive skills shortages

Data science skills are in very short supply helping to drive salaries up. According to Payscale.com, the average annual salary for a senior data scientist is currently €70,318 – and rising. And you’ll need a broad range of skills that are rare to find in one person – according to research from McKinsey, “Best-practice companies rarely cherry-pick one or two specialist profiles to address isolated challenges. Instead, they build departments at scale from the start.”

Although you will realise significant benefits, building an in-house team to turn your company’s data into money will involve a substantial initial outlay.

Instead of making new hires, you could retrain existing staff. But this will greatly increase the time to get your advanced analytics program up and running – and longer still until you see returns on your data analytics investments.

Why you should consider outsourcing

Keeping analytics in-house creates a huge burden on time and resources – at least during the initial stages of building your data analytics capability. Over time they will deliver value, but many CFOs will baulk at the time it takes to generate a return on investment.

Partnering with an external provider offers a much quicker return on investment because the entire process is shortened. And because your partner already has a suite of pre-configured analytics tools, they can begin unlocking value from your data almost immediately.

Outsourcing can be a transitional process too. One way to get the best of both worlds is to outsource all of your predictive analytics functions initially while you build an in-house data science team. As those capabilities come on stream, you can then start bringing functions back in-house.

Using third party consultancy also helps you avoid the staffing issues inherent in trying to maintain operations in-house. Your business doesn’t have to attract suitably skilled data scientists, or deal with rapidly increasing salary demands.

Outsourcing can be implemented in different ways too. Hybrid outsourcing allows you to split responsibilities with your analytics partner for instance. Under this model you retain responsibility for some elements – for example, the underlying database infrastructure, while the outsourcer provides others, such as the hard-to-come by modelling and analytics functions. The hybrid model is fully flexible because no two scenarios or deployments are ever the same.

This allows you to maximise the use of your own staff resources and minimise outsourcing costs without limiting your analytics projects and obtain the skills you really need for data-driven operations.

Speed is everything

When it comes to improving the customer experience, speed is incredibly important. Giving people what they want, when they want it is a key aspect of all customer retention strategies.

As you roll out your data analytics program, speed needs to be a factor at every point – including before you even begin analysing data. The faster you can get your predictive analytics capability in place and generating insights, the quicker you can begin to realise a return on your investment. McKinsey even put a figure on operating profit improvements, suggesting “first movers” account for around 25% of the gain Why? Because they have more time to integrate analytics with workflows than their competitors.

In reality, if your business has never used predictive analytics tools before, choosing to implement data-driven strategies in-house could be a mistake. Any initial cost saving will be quickly cancelled out by the extended time it takes to begin generating actionable insights. Far better to outsource the work to the experts initially, and have your outsource partner train and gradually hand over hand over responsibility for analytics as it comes up to speed.

For more help and advice on finding the optimum mix between in-sourcing and outsourcing for your data analytics team, please get in touch.

Advanced analytics, customer churn and the appliance of science

A crowded street with people marked, indicating the importance of analytics and data
 
 In 2010 Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google) said “Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.” That’s something like five exabytes of data. According to IBM, the build out of the “internet of things” will lead to the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours. Let that sink in for a moment.

We take the digital era for granted these days, we’ve normalised its existence but when you step back and think about its impact, it’s as remarkable as it is overwhelming.

With the collective knowledge of the entire history of civilisation available for dissection, human behaviour has been documented in its entirely.

We’ll leave the philosophical ramifications of all of this to others – this is a B2B article on advanced analytics after all, but it’s worth taking in the bigger picture of just how much data is out there.

If we leave aside the focus on big data and the internet of things and apply advanced analytics on just a tiny speck of this information – your customer database – the insights gleaned from their behaviour will be decisive in the future success or failure of your company.

Customer Intimacy

To start with, let’s get the most obvious learning out of the way – retained customers are way more valuable than new ones, due to the costs of acquiring new customers. Adobe once found that it takes seven new shoppers to equal the revenue of a single repeat customer.

So if your focus is on retention campaigns, then your focus needs to be on your existing customer base. The development of programs to improve customer experience has been a direct result of this understanding. By delivering an exceptional experience, customers will not defect – or so the theory goes. But despite throwing millions of euros at “experiences”, customers continue to defect. If anything, they leave even more quickly and easily than ever before.

So what has gone wrong?

Net Promoter Score

Customer experience is a nebulous concept, but there has to be a way to assess its success. And so the famous “net promoter score” (NPS) was born. For a while marketers felt they had a good way of understanding satisfaction levels by simply asking customers what they thought.

Surveys were sacrosanct.

But there is a problem with surveys and the NPS regarding churn prediction – what customers say and do are two different things. According to a report published in Bloomberg Businessweek 60% of defecting customers describe themselves as ‘very satisfied’ just before they leave.

To make matters worse, the evidence of their impending defection has always been available – if you know where to look.

The Appliance of Science – Applied Analytics

Your existing customer database is a veritable goldmine of data for analysing customer behaviours. Every interaction between brand and consumer creates a digital footprint, an indication of intent – if you know how to read them.

Applied analytics provide a way to spot trends and patterns based on past behaviours. By classifying and categorising customers based on commonalities, you can drill down into those behaviours and better understand customers as individuals.

By following the behavioural trail you can identify indicators of intent. A customer may not say they are leaving, but their behaviour provides clues about what they are thinking. Has there been an increase in calls to customer support? A use of increasingly negative language in their emails? A reduction in their use of your service? All the behavioural indicators are there in plain sight – but only if you know what to look for and how to analyse it.

Taking these indicators and comparing them to the behaviours of other customers, you can predict their next move.

And here is the thing – you can identify, understand, and predict behaviour right down to the individual.

You can uncover how any one customer feels about your service and your offering and confidently predict how likely they are to leave, when are they likely to leave, why are they likely to leave, and what offer will make them happy to stay.

Act Early, Reduce Costs

With refinement your analytics will begin to identify these behaviours much more quickly, allowing you to act earlier. The sooner you act, the easier it is to recover the relationship – and the cheaper the incentive you need to offer. Your analytics will even reveal which retention incentives have had the greatest success for similar customers previously, further increasing your chances of a positive outcome for both parties.

Instead of issuing surveys that can be ignored, or which capture inaccurate sentiment data, analytics use the actual behaviours of your existing customers to make extremely accurate inferences and predictions. Statistical patterns provide actionable insights in a way that the nebulous NPS scoring system cannot, which means that your attempts to improve customer experience will always be more effective because you better understand each customer as an individual.

Fads come and go, but predictive behaviour modelling is just that…predictable. All the answers are there, but very few have the expertise or the tools to spot them, track them, report on them and recommend actions.

Speak to one of our analytics experts to see how you can use advanced analytics to improve your customer experience and reduce churn.

 

Will my car pass the NCT?

Several cars parked in a parking space
 
 

EDIT 7/8/18: Our NCT work featured in the Sunday Independent: https://www.independent.ie/life/motoring/car-reviews/which-car-is-best-of-the-test-37185356.html 

In Ireland, every car over 4 years old requires a roadworthiness certificate, which it gets bypassing the National Car Test (NCT). If you’re buying a used car, it’s important to know how likely that make and model is to pass the NCT – and if it fails, on what part of the test.

To help you find out this information, Idiro has analysed the results of the last 5 years’ NCT tests – and we offer you two tools:

The NCT checker

Idiro has created a simple NCT car checker tool, available online. You’ll find it at www.Idiro.com/NCTchecker.

Just enter the make, model and year of the car in question to learn all about how these cars perform in the NCT. If your car is quite rare, like the Mazda MX-5, then we recommend that you select all the years of NCT tests. Otherwise, just leave 2017 ticked.

As you can see, Mazda MX-5s from the year 2000 have a 66.3% failure rate across 5 years of tests – just slightly worse than the average of 65.7% for all cars of that age. However, look at the detail – the MX-5 does much better than average for some elements (no failures for suspension!) but much worse for others (four times worse for emissions). That will help you know what to look for when buying a used car, and help you prepare your car to maximise its chance of passing the NCT.

Idiro's NCT checker - input form and results

Our handy NCT checker works on phones, tablets and PCs. Kudos to my colleague John Grant for building it.

Exploring all of this year’s NCT results

For people who would like to dig deeper into the NCT results, we have produced an interactive dashboard as a demonstration of our data analytics skills.

CLICK HERE TO OPEN THE 2017 NCT DASHBOARD

Again, it uses data published by the Road Safety Authority covering 2017 NCT tests. Data has not been published on retests, so our dashboard covers the first NCT test that each car underwent in 2017.

For practical purposes, the data is filtered to show only the twenty most popular makes of vehicle tested in 2017, and for each of these, only models with at least 1000 tests in the year. This was necessary because to show every make and model of the car tested would make the dashboard so complex as to be unusable. As a result, from the total 1.4 million tests carried out in 2016, 1.1 million tests are represented in this dashboard.

However, if you do want to look at the makes and models of cars that are not shown in this analysis, you can download the full dataset from the RSA.

How to use this dashboard

Pro tip: To reset all your filters and return to the original screen, click your browser’s refresh button.

The RSA provides the ‘Year of Car’ of each car tested, which we understand to mean the year of first registration. You can filter by the age of cars using this slider. For example, if you want to see test results for all cars registered in 2010 or before, you simply drag the end buttons in the slider over to the desired year.

This is an interactive dashboard, so as you change one parameter, all of the graphs adjust to match your selection. For example, this bubble table shows the top 20 most popular makes of car with a 2010 or older registration. The bubble’s size indicates how popular that make is, and its colour indicates the make’s pass rate – from deep blue (high pass rate) to deep red (low pass rate).

Test volume and pass rate per make

In this example, we can see below that for vehicles registered in 2010 and older, Toyota is the most popular make and has a high pass rate.

Now let’s click on ‘Toyota’. As you can see, this changes all the charts in the dashboard – they now only show the details of Toyota models.

Toyota selected

Pro tip: To compare different car makes, hold down the CTRL key while you click on each make that you want to filter in the bubble chart “Overall Popularity & Passing % of Model”.

Now let’s examine the different Toyota models. In the next graphic to the right, ‘First-time pass rate by model’, you’ll see the pass rate of each Toyota model.

First time pass rate for Toyotas

In the table on the far right entitled ‘Most Popular Model & Age’, you’ll see each model in the Toyota range. The Prius is the Toyota with the highest pass rate, but it isn’t the most popular Toyota – as you can see, the Corolla is the most popular (as you will see, Corollas have been around since 1980).

As you scroll down, you can see the ‘First Time Failure By Year’ graph which shows the number of cars tested (blue bars) and failure rates (red line) for each year of registration. As you can see, younger cars are much more likely to pass the NCT. To look at failure rates over time in each category within the test, you can filter by category in the drop-down menu.

First Time failure

To the right, you’ll see the ‘First Time Failure By Category’ table, which shows the percentage of cars that fail each category within the NCT test. This image displays what caused Toyota cars to fail their NCT.

As you can see, the dashboard allows you to dig deep into the 2017 NCT test results. Here again, is the link to the dashboard:

https://public.tableau.com/profile/idiro.analytics#!/vizhome/NCT2017Top20Makes/NCT2017-20MostPopularMakes

This dashboard works best on PCs, rather than mobiles. Kudos to colleagues Paul Goldsberry and John Grant for building it.

We do hope you find these tools useful. To discuss how Idiro’s analytics skills can help your business, drop us an email at info@idiro.com.  To download the source data from RSA.ie, click here.

 

 

Idiro shortlisted for awards

Technology Ireland Software Awards : Idiro

We are delighted to announce that Idiro has been shortlisted for awards in two categories of the prestigious Technology Ireland software awards.  Our two categories are:
  • Digital Technology Services Project of the Year, for our analytics project in the South Pacific
  • Technology Innovation of the Year, for Red Sqirl, Idiro’s advanced analytics platform for Big Data
Idiro’s CEO, Aidan Connolly commented: “It is an honour to be shortlisted for these awards and it is a testament to the ingenuity and hard work by the team”. The awards ceremony is on Friday 24th November and our fingers are crossed.

Twenty numbers that define Enda Kenny’s leadership in the past six years

A picture of Stewart's lodge in the evening

Ireland under Kenny's Leadership

 

Google, homelessness and a shrinking unemployment rate: a look at the figures that will come to define Enda Kenny’s  leadership legacy—for better and worse.

  • 2,277: days in power on 1st June 2017.
  • €197,000: Enda Kenny’s average salary between the 2011 election and the end of 2016. 
  • 14.4%: the unemployment rate in February 2011 when Enda Kenny was elected Taoiseach. 
  • 6.2%: the unemployment rate in April 2017. 
  • 2.59%: average inflation rate in 2011. 
  • 0.01%: average inflation rate in 2016. 
  • 7: words [the homeless] “don’t want to come off the streets” – Enda Kenny’s opinion on the homeless in 2016.
  • 4,588,252: the population of Ireland in 2011. 
  • 4,761,865: the population of Ireland in 2016.
  • 3.8%: increase in the population of Ireland between 2011 and 2016. 
  • 173,613: increase in population from 2011 to 2016.
  • €13,000,000,000: Apple’s Irish Tax bill.
  • 2.7: Doctors per 1,000 population in 2013 
  • 20: Ireland’s rank in 2015 for disposable income within the 38 OECD countries. 
  • 3,808: the number of homeless people in Ireland as of April 2011.
  • 7,472: the number of homeless people in Ireland as of March 2017.
  • 679: drug related deaths in 2013.
  • 26: seats lost by Fine Gael in the general election 2016.
  • €22,600,000,000: Google’s EMEA revenue from controversial advertising sales business in Ireland in 2015.
  • €47,800,000: tax paid by Google in Ireland in 2015.

 

 

Idiro researcher invited to speak at MACSI 10

The importance of academic research has never been underestimated here at Idiro Analytics. Encouraging our analysts to explore new and innovative technologies and techniques when solving data problems has always been a part of Idiro’s company culture.

Bridging the gap between academic research and industry is an area Idiro are very proud to be involved in. With this in mind, we’re happy to report that our colleague Davide Cellai was invited to be a speaker in the workshop to celebrate 10 years of MACSI.

This is Davide’s report from the event:

“Last week I participated, as an invited speaker, in the workshop to celebrate the 10 years of MACSI. MACSI (Mathematics Applications Consortium for Science and Industry) is a consortium based at the University of Limerick that promotes collaboration between applied mathematicians and industry.

MACSI was founded in 2006 by the largest single grant ever awarded to mathematics in Ireland, and since then it has been quite a special point of reference in the country for mathematicians interested in industrial applications. I had been working in MACSI for more than four years and I knew the people over there very well. MACSI engages in industrial collaborations both at the national and international level. People in the consortium work hard to improve products and processes for the industrial partners and provide advanced training in mathematical modelling to students and researchers.

A presentation slide on a projector explaining the long standing relationship between Idiro & MACSI

Idiro and MACSI have a long-standing collaboration. Indeed, Idiro is always keen to collaborate with academia. As we continuously improve our models and expand our range of services, we often employ cutting-edge research to meet those challenges. In 2014, when I was still in MACSI, I won a Science Foundation Ireland Industry Fellowship, a grant that gave me the opportunity to move to Idiro and apply Network Science models to the problem of predicting telecommunication churn, using one of the datasets available in the company. This work was so successful that I was later hired by Idiro as a Senior Data & Analytics Architect.

In my talk, I illustrated the model (called m-exposure model) that I developed during the Fellowship and the outcome of this work. While the m-exposure model was designed for portout churn, we then developed a similar model for expiry churn. Both models are now part of Idiro’s suite of SNA tools for churn prediction.

Finally, I presented some new ideas and challenges that we would like to pursue in the near future.

There was a lot of interest in my talk. I got both great questions and great feedback (and lots of compliments) in the following hours. Some of the scientists in the audience were particularly interested in Idiro’s future projects. Hopefully, we will get some good ideas for designing our next products.

The workshop was also very interesting in its own way. I listened to some great envisioning talks. In one of them, Professor Wil Schilders was comparing the benefits of faster computer hardware with faster algorithms. His point was that the latter was actually more interesting. In other words, it’s often better to have a new algorithm running on an old computer than an old algorithm running on a new computer. Some other talks were also speaking about how science can improve society, from the elimination of tropical diseases to exact calculation of delay time after a road incident. I was delighted to be invited to such a great event.”

Idiro Analytics researcher's posing before the MASCI talk.

A sentiment analysis of a Premier League game: Man United vs Arsenal

Premier League logo on a red background

A sentiment analysis of a Premier League game: Man United vs Arsenal

One of the biggest rivalries in the English Premier League is the one between Manchester United and Arsenal. Less so in recent years since the retirement of Alex Ferguson, but still a hugely anticipated match between two of the world’s biggest clubs.

One of the major outlets for fans of these two clubs to voice their opinions and feelings about upcoming games is Twitter. With a Twitter fanbase of 9.31M for Man United and 8.48M for Arsenal, it can be a great source of data about how the fans are feeling in the build-up to a game and their emotions in the hours after it.

On the 19th of November 2016, Man United and Arsenal went head to head in a game that, in all honesty, won’t go down in history as being a great game. Although both teams are battling to stay in the running for the title, the game ended with just a 1-1 draw. Nothing all that exciting for the Twitter followers to remark on (with the exception of the equalising goal).

But we can still see some interesting results when we analyse the tweets being posted about the game by doing a sentiment analysis. A sentiment analysis essentially takes a piece of text and assigns emotions to the specific words being used. That overall text can then be determined to be positive or negative and we can work out the specific emotions being expressed. We can then plot these emotions on a graph and examine how they change over time.

For example, this tweet below can be classed as being an overall negative one. Each of the words being used “abysmal”, “gutless” etc. can be grouped into specific emotions, this helps us understand the feelings being expressed in the tweet.

Below is a graph of the results. As you can see, tweets about this game started growing strongly an hour or two before the match, peaked towards the end of the match, and declined steadily until ten hours after the match.

Two interesting points worth highlighting from the results are the levels of surprise and trust:

Looking at the surprise, we can see a clear spike towards the end of the game, most likely caused when Olivier Giroud scored the equalising goal in the 89th minute.

Analysing the trust is quite interesting, a huge number of people tweeting felt a lot of trust before the game kicked off, it then drops slightly after kickoff but starts to rise again half way through the game. Possibly at halftime with the score being 0-0, the fans felt it was all still all to play for.

It’s clear to see the potential use cases for a system such as this, a complex analysis of a large constantly updating dataset, scheduled to run at predefined intervals. For example, we’ve used this previously to explore the sentiment on the US presidential election.

The difficulty with an analytical project like this is setting it up. Building the data pipeline that goes from gathering the data, to building the analysis workflow, to scheduling that workflow to run periodically and then to display the results, usually takes a lot of expertise and overhead. However, Idiro Analytics have developed a tool called Red Sqirl which can perform each of these steps in one intuitive interface.

Modern sports and data analytics now go hand-in-hand, it’d be hard to imagine a professional sports organisation that wouldn’t be utilising data analytics in some form. And with data becoming more easily obtainable, it opens up so many more opportunities. With the right tools data analytics can be accessible to a lot more people.

Red Sqirl

Red Sqirl is a flexible drag-and-drop Big Data analytics platform with a unique open architecture.

Red Sqirl makes it easy for your analysts and data scientists to analyse the data you hold on your Hadoop platform.

For more information visit RedSqirl.com, and for a guide on how to build the entire process of analysing Twitter data using Red Sqirl, as outlined above, please read our detailed guide.

Title image courtesy of Premier League ©

What do the Irish think about Trump and Clinton?

Animated depiction of Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton asking for Irish votes

Comparing Irish people's opinions to the rest of the world

It’s everyone’s favourite subject right now, the US election. Unless you’ve somehow avoided consuming any form of media over the last few months, you’ll have no doubt been exposed to a lot of opinions and “facts” about the two front runners for the US election Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

With such a media overload, it’s hard not to form our own ideas about who should be elected and who shouldn’t. It’s a strange phenomenon, the world being so invested in an election for a nation we have no vote in. The American people will vote for an American president, and yet the rest of the world seems to feel like we’re involved in the decision.

With this in mind, we here at Idiro Analytics decided to get a clearer understanding of the opinions of people here in Ireland surrounding the election. Do the opinions of the Irish people differ from those of the rest of the world?

To do this we chose to use Twitter as our source of public opinion to do an analysis on. We gathered thousands of tweets posted about the election over a 24 hour period in the days leading up to the election and ran a sentiment analysis on them.

This means we were able to break down each tweet and work out the sentiment (overall feelings) being expressed by analysing the types of words being used in each tweet. From this, we can then chart if the majority of tweets being posted about both Clinton and Trump are positive or negative and the general feelings behind each one.

First, let’s look at the sentiment for both Clinton and Trump worldwide:

One interesting note from the two charts above is the huge difference in the number of tweets being posted about each person. The number of people tweeting about Trump is over three times higher than the number of people tweeting about Hillary.
If we break this down further into just positive and negative sentiments, we can see that the majority of Tweets being posted worldwide about both Clinton and Trump are negative.


Now let’s look at the sentiment of Irish people towards the two. (Note that in order to get a large enough sample to analyse, we used tweets posted by people in Ireland over 4 to 6 days leading up to the election)

From looking at the chart above, it’s strange that even after all we’ve read about Trump over the past year, we’re still surprised by him.



Although it’s not by a huge amount, we can see that the sentiment towards Hillary in Ireland is positive compared to the negative worldwide sentiment towards her, whereas Trump is still negative.
Lastly, let’s combine the worldwide sentiment for both Hillary and Trump versus the sentiment towards them in Ireland.



From these last two charts we can see that the Irish people have a little more fear and anger about the future than the rest of the world. Is there something we know that they don’t?

 

The data analytics work for this article was performed using Red Sqirl. From within Red Sqirl, we were able to build a data pipeline that gathered thousands of tweets, sorted each tweet, run multiple different analysis steps on the data and output results into visualisations in real-time. Visit the Red Sqirl website for more details

About Idiro
Based in Dublin, Ireland, Idiro Analytics is an award-winning provider of analytics to businesses around the world.
For an overview of Idiro’s analytics services, see our homepage www.idiro.com

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Simon Rees, Clients & Marketing Director, Idiro Analytics.
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Can Ireland beat the All Blacks? Irish people really believe they can

An article on sentiment analysis for the rugby match between Ireland & New Zealand

There’s an excited buzz in the air for Irish rugby supporters right now. Tomorrow, once again, Ireland will take on the All Blacks, in an attempt to break a 27-time losing streak (and 1 draw), against unquestionably the greatest rugby nation in the world.
And you might think, what’s the big deal, this isn’t a major tournament, there are no records to be broken, it’s being played in a country that doesn’t have a love for the sport, nothing is really on the line. This is just one more attempt in a long 111 year losing streak to the All blacks.
And yet, the Irish never really look at things like that. When faced with impossible odds in any sport, when everyone has all but written us off, the Irish supporters always have the mindset of ‘yeah but what if…’
But what if, they’re just underestimating us
But what if, they slip up
But what if, they get overwhelmed by the Irish supporters
But what if …
As such a small nation, we’ll always be considered to be punching above our weight. But when it comes to rugby, we really do stand proudly up there with the best in the world. We truly believe that if everything goes right, we can beat any team.
The emotions felt for the Irish team is a difficult thing to put down on paper, people talk of the mood in the Irish camp, the atmosphere around the stadium before a game, the emotions of the supporters, it’s not really something that can be drawn on a chart.
But what if there was a way?
If we were to use a data analytics technique called sentiment analysis, could we understand the overall emotions being felt about the game tomorrow?
Sentiment analysis is essentially taking a piece of text and by looking at the words being used, determining if that piece of text is overall positive, negative or neutral. Where this can become interesting is if we were to apply it to something like Twitter.
If we apply this technique to all of the tweets being posted by people in Ireland about the Ireland vs All blacks game, could we get a picture of the overall feelings towards the game?
So, looking at the weeks leading up to the game, we took all of the tweets from people talking about Ireland vs the All Blacks in Ireland and performed a sentiment analysis on them. We also decided to do the same with all of the tweets coming out of New Zealand about the game and we were able to plot them on the charts below.

What these two charts are showing us is the overall emotions being felt by the people in both countries about the game tomorrow. Now, we know this is far from definitive fact, these are only showing the feeling of the people talking on Twitter about the game, and that’s only going to be a fraction of the overall supporters. Interestingly, though, this would include any journalists posting about the game, the people that others look to help formulate opinions.
From looking at the results, we can see that a high proportion of the tweets from both countries have a sentiment of ‘anticipation’, which may seem obvious, but just stands to prove the concept of this technique.
The next highest sentiment from both countries would be a feeling of ‘trust’. Again, may seem obvious from the people in New Zealand, of course they would have trust in their team, it’s the All Blacks. But, this does bring us back to the point we made earlier, when up against a team we’ve never been able to beat, the Irish people still have trust that we can win.
Another interesting point to take from these tables is that, for New Zealand, there does seem to be some fear creeping in. We know and the All Blacks know that Ireland are a good team, there is the potential that they can actually win this game. And what may be weighing on the minds of the New Zealand supporters is that all of the pressure is on them. If Ireland lose, then they’ve lost to the best, but the All Blacks are the ones on the winning streak.
One last analysis we did was to get the overall feeling towards Joe Schmidt, with him committing his future to Ireland, we wanted to see what the Irish people thought. And as you can see from the chart below, we have complete trust in him.


COME ON IRELAND!