A recent research shows Israelis spend half of their leisure time online, averaging 6.2 hours in central areas of the country and 4.3 hours in the periphery. 94.3% of internet users, totaling at 5.6 million, spend a third of their time online on social networks publishing around 700 thousands (!) posts on various topics. At the same time, conventional media outlet publish only about 3,000 items - only 0.4% of the social "output".    

What can we do with this information and how can we translate it into business strategy? The Department of Industrial Engineering hosted Raviv Tal, CEO of Vigo, that specializes in monitoring information from social media, who talked about the different ways one can organize the chaos that is social media. 

"Social networks in Israel are not easy to comprehend", Raviv Tal at the Department of Industrial engineering (photo: Ahikam ben-Yosef) 

"Social networks have completely changed the way we consume content, and the way we create and preserve personal connections" said Raviv in the opening of the Business Intelligence class taught by Michal Koren. "As oppose to other means of communication, social networks are easy to characterize, they are accessible, global and require a simple content creating technology".  

"4 million Israelis have an active Facebook account and they spend about 2.5 hours on the social networks. 2.5 million people use different forums for consultations, and we didn’t even say a word yet about the amount of messages going through Whatsapp", added Raviv.

60% of the content in the American social networks are of a positive nature, however, Israelis prefer to let off steam and publish angry/frustrating/critical posts. “The Israeli social sphere is not an easy place and it is full of swear words, sarcasm and generally a negative approach” said Raviv and added that "Israeli users feel free to express themselves in a way they wouldn’t dare to on any other sphere, even when their details are public".

 How much will you pay for Milki in Berlin? Naor Narkis’ post that began a public protest (photo: print screen)

Social networks are extremely dynamic, and users don’t always think twice before hitting the ‘like’ and ‘share’ buttons. This can easily turn into political/media/business crisis. “Every crisis has three legs: the content, the arena where the content was published, and the distribution rate”. According to Raviv, after a crisis catches social attention, it receives attention (just like the Cottage cheese and Milki protests and the reactions to Agadir and Goldstar Beer’s sexist commercials) from the traditional media and becomes influential.

Vigo monitors over 700 thousands posts daily in different social networks, which allows its clients to react immediately to specific events and prevent them from turning into a full blown crisis. Raviv said that some of the data is gathered from the companies themselves, such as Twitter, with whom they have a data sharing agreement, through key word search and a constant tracking social trends.

Cat (not) in the hat: social media’s favorite animal (photo: illustration by agirlnamednee, Flicker, public commons)

"Public information online can serve as business intelligence", said Raviv and demonstrated: "if a competing company’s CEO just checked in in Paris that can be a lead on a business venture. Tracking executives’ LinkedIn accounts can imply on funding rounds and different moves".

"Facebook has turned into a customer service platform when the time that passes until one can get a response is tracked and monitored", concluded Raviv and added that "in the past few years, most trends started online and smart companies are the ones who know how to ‘go with the flow’ of current trends and leverage it for their own needs". 

Top of page: illustration by Daniel Iverse, Flickr, public commons