Case Study Waggener Edstrom

Waggener Edstrom Communications Enables Agile, More Impactful Campaigns with Natural Language Processing

Application Developers Automate Unstructured Data Analysis to Drive Public Relations ExcellenceIntegrated communications has not only transformed Public Relations (PR), it has also forged a new bond between PR professionals, analytics teams and application developers working in the industry. At Waggener Edstrom, it has brought application developers directly into the PR dialogue, where their skills and imagination are called on to create new tools and platforms for measuring campaign results on a daily or even moment-by-moment basis. These tools and platforms provide quick access to data that can be used to direct and modify campaigns and make the greatest business impact.

Waggener Edstrom Communications (WE) is a global integrated communications agency. For 30 years, the independently owned firm has developed strategic programs for innovative and world-changing clients, working to influence markets, inspire people and improve lives. In an effort to evaluate the business impact of their clients’ communications programs, Waggener Edstrom created WE Infinity, a data mining and analytics platform.

“With the rapid pace of today’s communications environment combined with a deluge of data, our clients need to have accurate intelligence that helps them make decisions they can trust. With WE Infinity, we are helping our clients answer two of the most fundamental communications questions: Did I make an impact, and how do I improve my impact going forward,” says Karla Wachter, Waggener Edstrom Communications senior vice president of Insight & Analytics.

The Solution: WE Infinity – Near Real-Time Analysis Using Five AlchemyAPI ServicesThis data mining and analytics platform was designed to identify trends and discover competitive intelligence that shows where and how performance improvements can be made. It takes unstructured data, measures it for impact and helps Waggener Edstrom’s clients understand what is working, what isn’t and the key actions they can take to optimize performance. WE Infinity transforms an approach that once was entirely manual – visiting numerous web sites and listening to multiple social channels on a daily basis – to a more than 80% automated process.

Company Profile:� Integrated communications agency

NLP Problems: �Analyzing real-time datato determine if the content is relevant to a specific customer �Cost-effective, rapidproof-of-concept & application development

AlchemyAPIs Used:�Keyword Extraction�Concept Tagging�Named Entities�Author Extraction�Text Extraction

Volume of Content Analyzed:� 1.5 million tweets/day� 2.5 million posts/day

Type of Data Analyzed:�Website content�Social media�News coverage

Result: �Prototype app developedin one week �WE Infinity: real-timedata mining and analytics platform

Case Study Waggener Edstrom

“We wanted to crunch near real-time data, and we needed a way to analyze it to determine if it was relevant to our clients,” shares David Kohn, Waggener Edstrom vice president of software development. “Our developers quickly built a proof-of-concept that included AlchemyAPI’s services using the free API keys available on the website. That was given to a larger team of developers with the challenge to build their own tools using that platform.”

The prototype and tools were developed in one week and presented to agency business leaders. “When they saw the prototype and recognized its potential for streamlining campaign assessment, we quickly received a green light to move the product forward.” Kohn also states, “Without AlchemyAPI, we certainly would not have been able to do that.”

The WE Infinity platform employs five AlchemyAPI natural language processing (NLP) services for each piece of information that they review. What makes it so effective is that each service can be “trained” to find keywords, themes, authors, etc. that are directly tied back to the client and the campaign:

� Keyword Extraction – Finds and ranks specific keywords in page content and index.html

� Concept Tagging – Enables abstraction, understanding how concepts relate, and tags accordingly

� Entity Extraction – Identifies people, companies, organizations, cities, geographic features and other entities from HTML, text or web-

based content� Author Extraction – Identifies the source for news articles and blog posts � Text Extraction – Retrieves the text from web pages and strips the

“chrome” while allowing return of embedded links; Infinity also extracts content titles using Text Extraction

After articles and discussions are located on targeted web sites and social channels, analysis services are “turned on and off as is appropriate,” according to Kohn. Content is processed through AlchemyAPI REST services and then sent to an editing application that matches articles and discussions to concepts that WE’s account teams and clients want to further review. Messaging and communications channels are assessed and changes can be executed almost immediately.

The Value: Data-Driven Decisions Create a Bigger Bang for Every Campaign Dollar“We can make really strategic, data-driven changes,” explains Wachter. Reports that once took days, can now be delivered in hours and at a level of insight previously unobtainable. The result is more informed decisions, strategy modifications and story adjustments that drive a positive impact on the client’s business.

“We know that if we can get much closer to real-time analysis of the content generated about our clients’ brands, products, issues and competitors, we’ll enable agile PR strategies that can be modified as campaigns roll out and mature.”

Karla WachterSVP Insight & Analytics

Case Study Waggener Edstrom

As an integrated communications agency that must clearly show clients research and insights into how it is helping drive business impact, WE Infinity is a key differentiator. “WE Infinity will give our clients more intelligence to gauge whether they are making an impact on their objectives,” remarks Wachter. “Are they using the right narrative? What can they do to improve the performance of the campaign? Are they progressing toward the desired outcome? These are all questions WE Infinity will help our clients answer, faster and with more confidence.”

ConclusionThe data produced about brands, products and issues is only growing in today’s fast paced environment. But data is just data until it is transformed into useful intelligence that helps communications professionals understand their audience, who influences them and where, what messages resonate and what ones don’t. With solutions like WE Infinity, not only is Waggener Edstrom providing near real-time insight into the performance of communications activities, but what can be done to improve performance going forward.

About AlchemyAPIAlchemyAPI’s mission is to power a new generation of smart applications that understand human language and vision by democratizing breakthroughs in deep learning-based artificial intelligence. Our easy-to-use, high-performance cloud services for real time text analysis and computer vision give companies the intelligence needed to transform vast amounts of unstructured data into actions that drive their business. AlchemyLanguage™ is the world’s most popular natural language processing service; AlchemyVision™ is the world’s first computer vision service for understanding complex scenes. AlchemyAPI is used by more than 40,000 developers across 36 countries and a wide variety of industries to process over 3 billion texts and images every month. For more information, visit our website at www.alchemyapi.com.

AlchemyVision is a registered trademark of AlchemyAPI, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. *Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

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