Brand Management: Source Discovery with Infinit.e

Brand management is something that all companies have to consider in the social media age, but this is especially true in the gaming industry. The industry is experiencing 10% growth annually with overall revenue expected to exceed $80 billion by 20141, but getting into the highly competitive market is not cheap or easy. Many of the biggest games today take years to produce. In order to recoup development costs, producers need to take every step possible to cultivate a strong following during the development of the game to ensure immediate return on investment. Monitoring what people are saying about the game becomes essential with this goal in mind. Unfortunately, this monitoring is usually time consuming to do well, requiring researchers and brand managers to scour and track internet postings and social media for relevant content. If they cast too wide of a net, they can be inundated in meaningless data; too narrow a net and they cannot accurately gauge what people are saying about the product.

Case Study

We decided tackle the problem of finding and analyzing relevant social media and web content related to a product offering by using Infinit.e, our open source analytic platform. To see what insights we could derive from the social media buzz around an upcoming game, we selected the Elder Scrolls Online by Zenimax Online Studios; the first massively multiplayer addition to a franchise has seen incredible success over the years. As a as a massively multi-player game, a dedicated player following is even more important than in many other genres to ensure consistent revenue. Further, as a title just announced in May with still over a year until release, the Elder Scrolls Online marketing campaign is still in the early stages, with plenty of time to adjust to player feedback.

Methodology

We started our search by taking a simple Twitter search for the name of the game. We ingested the results for a search of “Elder Scrolls Online” into Infinit.e via an RSS feed for 10 days starting from June 27, 2012. Twitter lets users see back over two weeks, so we effectively had visibility on 24 days of tweets. Infinit.e harvested each tweet’s full text and then uses open source natural language processing tools to extract and enrich main keywords with sentiment, twitter handles, and hash tags.

Bloggers, journalists, and fans use Twitter to share their opinions, but the medium’s short format makes most automated attempts to assess sentiment somewhat hit or miss due to the lack of contextual clues. To help alleviate this problem, we also extracted every external link from the tweets and turned the resulting list of web pages into a second set of documents to be processed for key words and sentiment. Both sources were placed in a unified data format that we could analyze for trends. The benefit from this second dive cannot be underestimated. The process essentially crowd sourced the effort usually spent on manually source discovery. The links alone contributed one third of the total documents in the final data set — a huge source of information that would have been missed had we just included Twitter.

Analysis

Once we had our sources built, Infinit.e’s built-in analytics and aggregations did most of the heavy lifting for us. Each tweet and web source was indexed with rich meta-data and the Infinit.e platforms’s robust visualization suite let us look at the data across numerous dimensions.

We took the aggregations of the keywords with sentiment and looked at them from each source individually and together. Not unexpectedly, some of the key words extracted were nuanced due to the sheer variety of terms unique to gaming and the franchise itself. Despite this, we could draw some general observations from the data. For instance, across each breakdown of negative sentiment, we found that many of the terms focused on the games teaser and graphics suggesting that the current previews and trailer videos for the game haven’t been well received. The positive keywords are equally interesting. In each breakdown, the most positive terms related back to the Elder Scrolls franchise itself. Terms and phrases like “award-winning” and “best-selling” along with terms like “Elder Scrolls” suggests that much of Elder Scrolls Online is benefiting from the halo effect of positive sentiment around the franchise itself more than anything else.

Hash tags are hallmarks of Twitter analysis, so we would be remise to not include them here as well. Using Infinit.e to aggregate the top hash tags in our Elder Scrolls Online we found that none of the top hash tags were actually unique to the Elder Scrolls Online title. This suggests that no single hash tag has reached critical mass to unify the discussion around the title. The top hash tag, #elderscrolls, comes close but it is also used to discuss other games in the franchise, such as the immensely popular Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. As noted earlier, the ambiguity between Elder Scrolls Online and the Elder Scrolls franchise probably gave the game some residual positive sentiment, but it could also be problematic later. The game’s lack of a unique identifier like “Skyrim” or “Morrowind” used to identify other games in the series probably will hinder company efforts to track user sentiment specific to the MMO. Championing a single hash tag unique to the MMO, not just the franchise, probably would improve Zenimax’s ability to monitor, and ultimately shape, the dialogue surrounding their game. This could be best accomplished tweeting more with the official @TheElderScrolls Twitter handle, which currently does not even feature in the top 10 handles in the data.

Conclusion:

Using Infinit.e and a 10-day Twitter feed, we were able to recommend potential improvements to the game’s media strategy that the company may want to alter the way teasers and trailers are produced. But these are just departure points for even deeper analysis. The full text of each tweet and webpage is still in the system. Further, Infinit.e did all the heavy lifting of source discovery by discovering several hundred external webpages with content relevant to the interests of brand managers and social researchers following the game. If you are interested in learning more how Infinit.e can help your organization tackle its own brand management and source discovery problems, request a demo and/or visit our website for more information.

About the Author:

Andrew Strite – Solutions Architect

As a Solutions Architect, Andrew works directly with clients and IKANOW’s delivery team to create analytic solutions and manages the execution of the solutions from start to finish. Andrew has 6 years of experience in program management, strategic analysis, and requirements development. Before joining IKANOW, Andrew was a U.S. Air Force Intelligence Officer. Andrew holds a M.A. in Intelligence Studies from American Military University and a B.A. in History from the University of Delaware. Andrew describes his hobbies stating, “I’m an avid gamer; I especially love strategy games or those with open worlds. Lately, I’ve also been wedding planning with my fiancée.”