Unstructured Data to Intelligence

In recent years, improved computer power and advances in sophisticated algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) have allowed us to process more data than ever. These methods help us to make sense of huge amounts of data quickly and efficiently. But they need more to constitute a useful and real research approach.

Based on the experience of the teams at Synthesio and Ipsos, we have observed three broad methodological building blocks of any meaningful social media intelligence program:

• Social media intelligence platforms (software platforms designed to enable social listening from different sources of data providing real-time access to various metrics through the means of interactive dashboards)
• AI-led advanced analytics (text, picture and video analytics designed to make sense of unstructured data using NLP, machine learning, data mining and statistical analysis etc.)
• Human-driven insight discovery (individual researcher contribution to finding insights from social media data using analytical frameworks).

On their own, each building block brings something useful to answering critical client questions. Combined, they bring powerful insight. To demonstrate these building blocks in action, we highlight some COVID-19-related examples from our Synthesio social intelligence platform dashboards to better understand the status and implications of the pandemic.