Empowering one of the first social media monitoring solutions.
About the Client
BuzzGain was founded in 2009 in Sunnyvale, California. BuzzGain Inc. provides social media monitoring solutions. BuzzGain helps listen, learn, analyze and engage with digital influencers for outreach efforts in an actionable fashion.
Meltwater Group, one of the world’s leading global Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies, acquired BuzzGain Inc. for $4 Million in Feb 2010. Our solution is currently serving as the platform to enhance Meltwater’s social media monitoring service, Meltwater Buzz. Due to the explosive growth of social media in 2000s, tracking what’s being said about a brand or product on the Internet became a huge task. Product companies needed to track a multitude of social networking sites, blogs, message boards, podcasting sites, video blogs, micro blogs and consumer review sites on which conversations were being held. It was imperative to identify major influencers in social media and engage them to get the message out. Big businesses use PR companies and manual systems to identify and track online conversations, but the price is often out of reach to small & medium businesses. BuzzGain wanted to develop a do-it-yourself (DIY) solution which would enable SMBs to ‘listen, learn and analyze’ across millions of social media sources. The solution had to monitor keywords to discover relevant conversations and provide lists of news sites, blogs and other channels. There was also a need to identify influential writers and bloggers.
Challenges and Requirements
- Remote harvest of unstructured data from multiple sources (~millions, 1.3 TB per month).
- Data transformation (normalize across all sources), analyse data on different parameters i.e. sentiment, timeline, geography, source & demography – at run-time.
- High performance distributed data storage and high availability.
Our Role
Sakha Global was involved from product conceptualisation to its complete development and maintenance. The core BuzzGain service is divided into three sections: Listen, Learn, and Analyze.
- The Listen section allows search for keywords that users have designated that they would like to monitor (i.e., keep a search out for a recently-released product model to see if they had any complaints).
- The Learn section offers a listing of news sites, blogs, and Twitter users that have featured content relating to the user’s campaign keywords.
- Analyze section offers charts and graphs depicting how hot the user’s search terms are on the web using technology developed with Senti-Metrics.
Sakha Global automated the data ingestion process and used big data for distributed storage. We also used NLP to develop Sentiment Analysis for Social Media. Other functions include the ability to monitor blogs for new authors, or track which writers have been focusing on a certain topic. BuzzGain brings all sources (blog, news, social media) into a single interface that is much easier to manage and to navigate.
Technologies
Java, JavaScript, MySQL, Solr, HDFS, Hadoop
Benefits
Sakha Global provided several benefits to the client including:
- Proprietary media databases have long existed to help PR professionals understand their targets by building lists and sending press releases. We developed BuzzGain as an actionable application that facilitates engagement with mainstream & social media professionals without spamming them.
- Indexing technology was developed to discover, index and catalogue over 100 Million blogs, 250,000 video bloggers, 3.5 million bloggers and 30,000 media properties including dailies, magazines, periodicals & Television / Radio.
- 167-Node Hadoop cluster was implemented for distributed data storage having ~30TB data. MapReduce was used to map data across sources to produce intelligent analytics at runtime.
- Through business intelligence and machine learning, personalized notifications, tips & recommendations are offered to customers.
- The solution also enables the client to become a thought leader on Social Media by generating demographic reports.