Introduction

The IBM Social Merchandising solution gives you the information and insight that you need to provide proactive service to your customers.

Audience

This guide is for users of the Social Merchandising solution. It describes the insight and analysis available from the Social Merchandising reports that you can access in the cloud.

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Overview

IBM® Social Merchandising is an on cloud solution that provides you with insights into consumer buzz and sentiment about your products.

Social Merchandising analyzes external social signals and internal retailer data to give you improved understanding of the "why" as well as the "what" behind your customers' purchase behavior and trends.

What makes Social Merchandising different?

Social Merchandising analyzes data from multiple data sources. For example, Social Merchandising accepts data from product reviews and Twitter.

Social Merchandising helps you to understand why people feel the way they do about your products by aggregating, analyzing, and synthesizing large amounts of unstructured data.

Social Merchandising identifies trends and root causes by using scientific analysis rather than anecdotal evidence alone.

Social Merchandising provides a deeper level of analysis and insight by extending below the brand level to the department, category, and item level.

What questions does Social Merchandising answer?

What is the social sentiment of the category that I manage today? Has it changed this week or this month?

How to shoppers perceive the quality, value, and convenience of my category? Is this improving or getting worse?

Why are customers perceiving my category to be lower quality, less convenient, or lower value? What is being said and how often?

Who is the most influential shopper from Twitter or from my own product reviews?

What has been said about my favorite topics today or this week? Is a new topic emerging?

The reports

When you log in to IBM® Social Merchandising you see My Alerts - Rankings. This report gives you an at a glance view of the departments for which sentiment has changed significantly since the last period.

Here's the list of available reports:

My Alerts - Rankings

Displays the departments or categories for which the sentiment is significantly different from a previous period.

Buzz

Displays the distribution of rating for the selected department, category, subcategory, SKU, and period.

Sentiment Trend

Displays the tone of the comments about a product. You can see an overall sentiment score and drill down into specific comments.

Top Author Comments

Displays the reviews from the top authors.

Topic Cloud

Displays the most talked about topics for your products in a period.

Top Influencers

Displays the top five influencers by influencer sentiment or influencer behavior and type of sentiment.

My Topics - Rankings

Displays topics for which the sentiment is significantly different from a previous period.

Click an icon in the report panel on the left to select a report.

Filtering

Each report has different filtering capabilities. Click the filter icon filter icon to show or hide the filter panel.

Social Merchandising key terms

Here are some terms that will help you understand the reports:

Snippet

A segment of text contained in a comment that is relevant to your analysis.

Sentiment term

A word or words that express the tone of a sentiment. Social Merchandising applies linguistic rules to sentiment terms and creates sentiment phrases in a snippet. These phrases are used to determine the overall sentiment of the snippet. The sentiment can be positive, negative, neutral, or ambivalent.

Topic

A way to analyze Twitter data and track sentiment over time.

My Alerts - Rankings
My Alerts - Rankings shows you the departments or categories for which the sentiment is significantly different from a previous period. This report is a good starting point to explore your data because it shows you the areas that need your attention.

Buzz
Buzz shows you the distribution of rating for the selected department, category, subcategory, SKU, and period. This report does numerical analytics based on the rating scale of 1 to 5.

Sentiment Trend
Sentiment Trend shows the distribution over time of sentiment for products. You can see an overall sentiment score and drill down into specific comments.

Top Author Comments
Top Author Comments shows you the reviews from the top authors. A top author is someone that has a strong influence on the overall sentiment.

Topic Cloud
Topic Cloud shows you the most talked about topics for your products in a period.

Top Influencers
Top Influencers shows you the top five influencers by influencer sentiment or influencer behavior and type of sentiment.

My Topics - Rankings
My Topics - Rankings shows you the topics for which the sentiment is significantly different from a previous period.

My Alerts - Rankings

My Alerts - Rankings shows you the departments or categories for which the sentiment is significantly different from a previous period. This report is a good starting point to explore your data because it shows you the areas that need your attention.

Filters

Period

Select week or quarter

Hierarchy level

Select department or category

Sentiment trend view

Sentiment is derived from the text of the product review.

Select a department radio button and then click the sentiment trend icon sentiment trend icon.

After the report displays, you can filter further in the following ways:

Line chart or bar chart

Number of mentions or IBM® sentiment score. IBM sentiment score is on a scale from 1 to 100

If you select number of mentions, then you can also filter by sentiment type: all, positive, negative, neutral, or ambivalent

Comments view

The comments view of this report shows you the comments that people make that contribute to the sentiment ranking.

Select a department radio button and then click the comments view icon comments icon. A list of comments that are related to selections you made in the Product Hierarchies pane displays. For each comment, the author, review title, snippet, and sentiment is displayed. A snippet is Click a review title to see the full product review in the retailer's web site.

Parent topic: The reports

Buzz

Buzz shows you the distribution of rating for the selected department, category, subcategory, SKU, and period. This report does numerical analytics based on the rating scale of 1 to 5.

This report provides a view of the state of consumer opinions about products to help you quickly focus in on more challenged products.

In the Product Hierarchies pane, you can filter on the following items:

Select a department

Select a category

Single or multi-select subcategory

Single or multi-select SKU

Select quarter or week period. Select week only if there are a lot reviews.

Click Refresh to run the report.

The data is displayed in a bar chart that shows the number of reviews on the x-axis and subcategory and SKU on the y-axis. Hover over a section in the bar to see the average rating and number of reviews for the section.

Under Overall Change, you can see trend values that are compared to today, the last 30 days, and the last 90 days.

Parent topic: The reports

Sentiment Trend

Sentiment Trend shows the distribution over time of sentiment for products. You can see an overall sentiment score and drill down into specific comments.

Sentiment is a measure based on text analytics. Sentiment can be an overall measure or it can be based on analysis of specific perspectives such as quality, value and convenience. For example, if a review discusses the quality of a product, its sentiment is included in the Quality perspective of the report. This report transforms a collection of reviews into scientific sentiment scores based on the presence of key words. Using a synthesized, more analytically derived metric provides a better measurement to assess the change in attitudes about your products.

In the Product Hierarchies pane, you can filter on the following items:

Select a perspective: overall, quality, price, or convenience. If a review mentions the quality, price, or convenience of a product, its sentiment is included in the corresponding perspective report.

Select a department

Select a category

Single or multi-select subcategory

Single or multi-select SKU

Select quarter or week period. Select week only if there are a lot of reviews.

Click Refresh to run the report.

After the report displays, you can filter further in the following ways:

Line chart or bar chart

Number of mentions or IBM® sentiment score. IBM sentiment score is on a scale from 1 to 100

If you select number of mentions, then you can also filter by sentiment type: all, positive, negative, neutral, or ambivalent

The reporting period displays on the x-axis and the number of mentions or IBM sentiment score displays on the y-axis.

Click a bar or point in the chart to display the comments view. A list of comments that are related to selections you made in the Product Hierarchies pane and time period displays. For each comment, the author, review title, comment, and sentiment is displayed. Click the review title to see the full product review in the retailer's web site.

You can also see this report when you select the Sentiment trend view in My Alerts - Rankings.

Parent topic: The reports

Top Author Comments

Top Author Comments shows you the reviews from the top authors. A top author is someone that has a strong influence on the overall sentiment.

A top author is determined by the following things:

How recent a review is

The number of positive and negative snippets in the comment

If the review is from Twitter, the number of followers the author has

In the Product Hierarchies pane, you can filter on the following items:

Select a perspective: overall, quality, price, or convenience. If a review mentions the quality, price, or convenience of a product, its sentiment is included in the corresponding perspective report.

Select a department

Select a category

Single or multi-select subcategory

Single or multi-select SKU

Select quarter or week period. Select week only if there are a lot of reviews.

Click Refresh to run the report.

The report displays the author, rating, and comment. Click the author to see the full product review in the retailer's web site.

After the report displays, you can filter further in the following ways:

Sentiment type: all sentiments, positive, negative, neutral, or ambivalent.

Behavior type: all behavior, user, prospective user, recommended, detractor, potential churner.

Number of authors: top 5, 10, 15, or 20 authors.

Parent topic: The reports

Topic Cloud

Topic Cloud shows you the most talked about topics for your products in a period.

In the Product Hierarchies pane, you can filter on the following items:

Select a perspective: overall, quality, price, or convenience. If a review mentions the quality, price, or convenience of a product, its sentiment is included in the corresponding perspective report.

Select a department

Select a category

Single or multi-select subcategory

Single or multi-select SKU

Select quarter or week period. Select week only if there are a lot of reviews.

Click Refresh to run the report.

The report displays as a word cloud. The size of the bubble indicates the frequency or importance of the topic. You can filter further by number of topics. Click a bubble to choose one of the following reports:

Comments

Displays a detailed list of comments. For each comment, the author, review title, snippet, and sentiment is displayed. Click the review title to see the full product review in the retailer's web site. reviews in detail or the terms in detail.

Related terms

Displays the terms that are related to the topic in a word cloud.

Parent topic: The reports

Top Influencers

Top Influencers shows you the top five influencers by influencer sentiment or influencer behavior and type of sentiment.

This report tells you which author has the biggest impact on sentiment in a given time period for a given product category.

In the Product Hierarchies pane, you can filter on the following items:

Select a perspective: overall, quality, price, or convenience. If a review mentions the quality, price, or convenience of a product, its sentiment is included in the corresponding perspective report.

Select a department

Select a category

Single or multi-select subcategory

Single or multi-select SKU

Select quarter or week period. Select week only if there are a lot of reviews.

Click Refresh to run the report.

The data displays in two bar charts, each chart shows data for a quarter or a week, depending on the period that you selected in the Product Hierarchies pane. Each bar in the chart shows the degree of influence as a percent for a day or a month. Click a section of a bar to display the Author Profile view. The Author Profile view lists all the reviews of the author, including ones that are unrelated to the filters that you selected in the Product Hierarchies pane.

After the report displays, you can filter further in the following ways:

Influencer: sentiment or behavior

Sentiment: all, positive, negative, neutral, ambivalent

Parent topic: The reports

My Topics - Rankings

My Topics - Rankings shows you the topics for which the sentiment is significantly different from a previous period.

Select a quarter or week to report on and then click Refresh to run the report. After the report runs, select a topic from the list and then click the Sentiment trend view icon sentiment trend icon or the Comments view icon comments icon.

Sentiment trend view

Sentiment is derived from the text of the product review.

Click the sentiment trend icon sentiment trend icon.

After the report displays, you can filter further in the following ways:

Line chart or bar chart.

Number of mentions or IBM® sentiment score. IBM sentiment score is on a scale from 1 to 100.

If you select number of mentions, then you can also filter by sentiment type: all, positive, negative, neutral, or ambivalent.

Comments view

The comments view of this report shows you the comments that people make that contribute to the sentiment ranking.

Select a department and then click the comments view icon snippets icon. A list of comments that are related to selections you made in the Product Hierarchies pane displays. For each comment, the author, review title, snippet, and sentiment is displayed. Click a review title to see the full product review in the retailer's web site.

Parent topic: The reports

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Product Information

This document applies to IBM Social Merchandising Version 1.0.0 and may also apply to subsequent releases.

Copyright

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© Copyright IBM Corp. 2015.

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Parent topic: Notices