Reality Buzz

Reality Buzz is a Facebook group dedicated to providing data-driven predictions for reality TV shows such as American Idol and Dancing with the Stars. It was created as an example to show the ease in gathering real-time web data to enhance knowledge, feedback, and intelligence about a question or issue. In this case, the question revolves around predicting who will be eliminated from a reality television show. But in more practical business terms, a customer might be interested in how real-time web data, in particular social media data, could help him better understand Voice of the Customer, Customer Satisfaction, Net Promoter Score, Product Quality, Customer Support Issues, Market Trends, Brand Strength or Competitive Threats. Think of it as improving the intelligence of your Business Intelligence solution

How it Works

Reality Buzz is owned and developed by Kapow Software and is based on our core technology, the Kapow Katalyst, to automatically collect, harvest, or scrape real-time, web data.

For both American Idol and Dancing with the Stars, we use our RoboMaker suite to create automated scripts (robots) to monitor targeted websites to bring back thousands of bits of information relative to the keywords we want to learn more about. In the case of American Idol, we read a list of contestants from the American Idol site and use it as input objects for our robots that harvest web data from Facebook, twitter, search engines, forums and discussion groups.

Building these robots for American Idol took less than one day - our powerful Visual IDE requires No Coding! If you can see the data you want in a web browser, you can harvest it without coding to APIs.

Process Flow

The unstructured data from our target sources is first transformed into structured data so we know the source, date of post/tweet, author, keyword, etc. It is then loaded in a MySQL database. From there we also perform text analytics or semantic analysis to determine if the data is positive or negative towards the contestant. We can then export the data to Excel to further analyze the data and create graphs to make our predictions.

We upload our graphs and predictions on our Reality Buzz Facebook fan page by the early afternoon ie., before the results are announced on the evening broadcast.

So in less than 24 hours, we can monitor social media sites, collect real-time data, and make insightful, data-driven predictions about the fate of these contestants.

Run your business at the speed of data

These days, enterprises must incorporate Web data into their intelligence and analysis tools in order to compete. To some, it's a matter of survival as the growth of real-time web data outpaces traditional BI and information management data, as shown in the chart.

Real-time data is where the answers are, where market and customer trends are immediately identifiable, and where deals will be won.

To learn more about how Kapow Software can help you take advantage of web and social media data, please contact us, we'd be glad to help get you started.