SONETA: a tool for supporting small business social presence. from a talk at HCI 2014 International

1. SONETA: a tool for supporting small
business social presence
IOANNIS IOANNIDIS, ELEFTHERIOS PAPACHRISTOS, CHRISTOS
KATSANOS, NIKOS KAROUSOS, CHRISTOS FIDAS, NIKOLAOS
AVOURIS
UNIVERSITY OF PATRAS, GR
HCI 2014 International, Crete June

2. motivation
In many countries the backbone of economy is
small enterprises (< 100 employees)
Social media play an increasingly important role in
monitoring customers opinion and advertising
products and services
The human skills and technological resources of
small enterprises are limited in monitoring social
media and improving company presence.
Adequate tools are needed to support this need.

3. User Generated Content and
Social media
Big data by Social Media are produced and need to
be processed by enterprises
In the next 60 seconds:
◦ Facebook users share 2.460.000 pieces of
content
◦ Youtube users upload 72 hours of new video
◦ Twitter users tweet 277.000 times
◦ Pinterest users pin 3472 images
www.domo.com/blog/2014/04/data-never-sleeps-2-0/

4. Use of Social media tools for
businesses
◦Brand monitoring
◦Targeted advertisement
◦Find out how users respond to
business decisions
◦Track opinion leaders
◦Competitive analysis

5. SMEs and social media tools
Major barriers in adoption
◦ Time scarcity
◦ Lack of financial resources
◦ Lack of technology skills
◦ Negative view about social media usefulness
◦ Unfamiliarity with specific technologies
Can social media tools help SMEs engage
more effectively with social media?
Stockdale, R., Ahmed, A., Scheepers, H.: Identifying Business Value from the Use of
Social Media: An SME Perspective. In: PACIS 2012 Proceedings, (2012)

6. SONETA
A twitter search tool for visualizing what
users mainly talk about in a specific region
Features
◦ Search on Twitter stream for tweets containing
specific keywords posted from a specific location
◦ Quantitative results (e.g. tweets per day)
◦ Comparative results of top keywords on a daily
basis
◦ Access tweets containing important keywords
(http://soneta.hci.ece.upatras.gr)

7. Soneta use: define new stream
Keywords
Location

8. Soneta use: Define time span
obtain frequencies
Time span
overview
Detailed view

9. Visualization of tweets contents
For specific
<Keywords,
Time span,
Location>
List of
tweets

10. Alternative representations

11. Architectural Design

12. Implementation
Communication Layer
◦ Twitter Search API 1.1
◦ Cron job to retrieve results
◦ Specific keywords
Storage Layer
◦ MySql
◦ Designed in such away that new components and services
Preprocessing Layer
◦ PYTHON
◦ Remove links
◦ Remove stop words
◦ Get tweets stored parse them and find the most frequent words
Presentation Layer
◦ D3.JS
◦ GOOGLE MAPS
◦ HTML5
◦ JQUERY

13. Evaluation study
Main Purpose
◦ examine whether SONETA could aid SMEs in achieving
their objectives
◦ help them engage with social media more effectively
3 SMEs with diverse profiles
◦ SME1: B2B Software company ( Software Quality Research Group) - 16
staff members
◦ SME2: B2C software company - 2 resident staff members and 4 external
collaborators
◦ SME3: B2C Internet Company - 6 resident staff members and 2 external
collaborators

14. Evaluation study-Process
Pre-study interview
◦ Basic profiling on social media usage
◦ Identify needs and problems
Training
◦ SONETA introductory session
SONETA Usage
◦ Deployment process
◦ User Experience
◦ Impact on Business goals
Post Interview

15. Evaluation study-Results
Pre-study interview
◦ All SMEs had Twitter accounts (infrequent usage)
◦ No stated need for geographic location search
◦ No stated need for tools filtering social media data for trends
◦ All SMEs had problems finding interesting content to post
Geographic location search
◦ Conceptually interesting
◦ SME1,SME2 experienced difficulties adapting it in their business domain
◦ SME3 extremely useful
Usability
◦ Difficulties in the beginning
◦ Word cloud visualization was useful
The potential of social media filtering tools was identified

16. Evaluation study-Results
Usage of SONETA :
1. Understanding trend topics in customer
conversations located in specific regions
2. Estimating the impact of targeted
advertising campaigns
3. Collected ideas for new user products or
services customized to a specific region.

17. Emerging questions
What is the relationship between
visualization and gaining insight from social
media data?
How multiple social media data can be
converged?
How can real time updates be adapted in a in
a effective easily understandable manner?

18. Conclusions
SMEs with B2C activities are more likely to
benefit from SONETA
Need for domain specific use case scenarios
Perceived quality of SONETA depends –at
least to some extent- with the SMEs attitude
towards social media

19. hci.ece.upatras.gr
THANK YOU!