Digital News South Africa

Crowdsourced ORM service launched

BrandsEye has introduced a new technique to its online monitoring application, which combines the benefits of three elements - the wisdom of the crowd, managed through attention to detail by computers and focused by the judgement of trained professionals.
Crowdsourced ORM service launched

The service uses crowdsourcing to bring local context and judgment to evaluating online mentions. This reportedly allows the company to take typical industry accuracy rate of 70% up to 90-95%, whilst maintaining a similar price to that of purely computer-based systems.

"The global online reputation management (ORM) industry has always been plagued with poor data quality," says Tim Shier, MD of BrandsEye. "Through this creation, we have solved the problem, allowing for the data and insights we gather for clients to be trusted as a far more central component of strategic decision making - throughout businesses."

Two parts

The solution comes in two parts: an algorithm based on the Elo rating system first developed to rank chess masters and a purpose-built artificial intelligence system that distributes the online mentions to be analysed by the crowd, whilst at the same time reconciling differences in opinion.

People who want to earn a little extra cash sign up to BrandsEye Crowd, which allocates them real-time mentions. The rater gauges if each mention is relevant and judges the sentiment, the location of the person that made the mention and the media type. Local context and local language subtleties are critical - along with the intuitive sense humans have for what other humans are trying to say. Computers are not great at picking up irony, sarcasm, humour or rage. People are. Based on their peer-reviewed accuracy, the crowd are paid for their effort.

"Quality insights"

"This system is a radical innovation in the ORM space. We know of crowdsourced rating in academia, especially economics, but not for commercial brands. We are proud of the system, which is already showing high accuracy and we believe can get to between 95-100% perfect with a bit more refinement. In this space accuracy is all-important - accurate data quality gives you quality insights, which helps you make better business decisions."

The company has been active in the ORM industry since 2006 (launching in 2008). With this new addition to its ORM offering, it will be providing clients in 113 countries with accurate insights from which to make better decisions.

For more, go to www.brandseye.com/crowd.

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