Earshot Builds with Watson APIs to Enhance its Marketing

Social Media IS Big Data. On any given day more than 500 million tweets and 55 million Facebook posts are generated. With that kind of volume companies simply cannot rely on manual processes to seek out and engage with relevant social media posts that indicate a potential customer prospect. The laborious task would be too time consuming and too costly. Thankfully, a Watson Ecosystem Partner called Earshot has created a solution to help solve this problem.

Earshot, which is a precision-based social media marketing platform, is using Watson’s Personality Insights and Image Tagging APIs to enhance its real-time relevancy score of social media posts. This score helps marketers automatically pinpoint which posts are most relevant to their brand. For example, if someone with ten thousand followers posts a picture of them setting up a tent, with a caption that matches the personality of the tent’s brand, the post would receive a high score. This would alert the marketer to engage with this consumer – decreasing consumer churn and increasing revenue.

So how is Earshot leveraging Watson to enhance their business, and what advice do they have for others? We asked the CEO/Founder of Earshot, David Rush:

IBM Watson Group: What is your favorite part about the Watson partnership? David Rush: The ability to have our platform be linked to the most powerful cognitive computing in the world

IBM Watson Group: Why is your solution unique? DR: We create a real-time relevancy score called Decibel Level that is unique to every client. We let them control what variables (key words, location, personality traits, etc.) influence this score so they can adjust according to their interests or campaign at that given moment.

IBM Watson Group: What advice can you give developers who want to build with Watson? DR: Understand how your application will be differentiated and play to those strengths using the power of Watson

IBM Watson Group: How are you implementing your Watson powered solution with clients? DR: We are using Personality Insights to inform what type of communications should be sent to people through social media and using Image Tagging to discover relevant posts for real-time engagement or intelligence for clients.

IBM Watson Group: Are you thinking about implementing other APIs? DR: Yes, we’re implementing Sentiment within the next couple of weeks and looking at a couple of other valuable API’s.

To wrap things up, we asked one more question…

IBM Watson Group: How did Earshot get started? DR: We actually started as a consumer app called Evzdrop where you could “eavesdrop” on places through people you didn’t know – think of Periscope and Yik Yak having a baby – a true interest graph. We quickly realized from clients that enterprise software was our game and shifted the business 24 months ago (and changed the name) to help major brands leverage the opportunity within social media in new and different ways.

With Watson, Earshot is an innovative company that adds value with their automated approach to finding relevant information in the sea of social media data.

This post is part of the Watson Ecosystem Stories Series that showcases various partners that are using Watson API’s to ignite change in their industries. Check back for new stories.

Apply here to the Watson Ecosystem You can find demos, videos, and documentation for the Watson APIs on the Watson Developer Cloud.