Success story
Citibeats
Citibeats applies Twitter APIs to drive social good.
Here's the tl;dr
To respond during the COVID-19 crisis, Citibeats used data from Twitter’s enterprise APIs to offer the full picture of what was going on with varied social needs, so they could surface the most actionable information. This allowed organizations like the Inter-American Development Bank to make aggregated data publicly available as a resource to governments and organizations across the region to help generate solutions to the crisis.
10M
Tweets analyzed in the first two months after CivicLytics launch
11 days
advantage over the media in reporting famine risks in VE and CO
Endpoints
Challenge
Social Coin launched Citibeats to help organizations and local communities identify and measure social trends and concerns. The Citibeats AI analytics platform analyzes any kind of natural language data - from social media, transcripts from public helplines, or chatbots - and discovers, categorizes, and synthesizes people’s opinions to offer qualitative analysis and sentimental insights that bring human meaning to the data.
Citibeats is used by organizations to measure public opinion and direct feedback related to key issues and allows them to better understand conditions and sentiment within a local community. Their clients are organizations involved with improving infrastructure, tourism and smart city innovations who want to identify and understand the reality and needs based on people’s opinions around relevant topics that drive social change. Critical decisions that affect many citizens are often driven by typical measures such as sales figures, tourist visits, or dollars invested. Citibeats wanted to provide a human layer - “empathetic” AI text analytics that mine millions of unstructured conversations and social data that take place every day and turn them into actionable insights for their clients.
As soon as Twitter’s premium APIs became available, the Citibeats team took advantage of it due to the ability to access every public Tweet via the premium Full-Archive Search endpoint. “Not having 100% of the Tweets wasn’t a problem when we were doing proof of concepts with our clients, but for project engagements it was important for us to get the full picture,” said Marc Puig, CTO of Social Coin. In addition, they were excited to compose more complex queries that became available as part of premium APIs.
"Citibeats helps us quantitatively grasp what goes on locally and the severity of problems that exist within a community. We can derive community insights more accurately and efficiently than ever before."
Hiroya Kamo, Executive Manager, Life Digital Division at NTT Data
Solution
The Citibeats team partnered with NTT Data and everis to support the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) initiative by the United Nations. The collaboration resulted in a SDGs Observatory, a new approach to use AI for social good. The team uses AI text analytics and Twitter data to understand public opinion about specific SDGs. While the SDGs are universal, the reality of how to affect change and implement solutions need to have the human or qualitative factors in mind. The SDGs observatory allows cities and brands to measure their challenges and improvements related to the 17 UN objectives created to end poverty, stop climate change and fight against injustice and inequality by 2030. The platform allows users to understand the issues specific to their local community/region while at the same time being able to benchmark and learn from other regions.
Twitter premium APIs enable Citibeats to analyze historical data so they can see how topics evolve over time and make more accurate predictions. Twitter data is at the center of every Citibeats project because in most cases it is the biggest data sample they have to gather and listen for public sentiment. It can also be combined with other datasets such as surveys, polls and other online forums to build a more holistic understanding of the topics they want to analyze.
"Cities can benefit from the platform’s ability to make ongoing trends and opinions more objective and use it as a basis to make better informed decisions."
Ruben Canovas, Head of Smart Cities, Public Sector at everis
Results
Citibeats monitored the SDGs in 4 metropolitan areas of Spain to validate their needs, improve business collaboration and align programs that speak directly to citizen sentiment. In one study, Citibeats detected that a critical concern in 2 of the largest metropolis was around the environment. However, the sentiment and concerns from the citizens led to a very different impact and set of action items for each city. For one city, citizens were concerned about water, waste and air pollution at the local level whereas citizens in the other city expressed more concerns around climate change at the global level.
Social Coin was honored by the United Nations and the European Commission as the best inclusion and empowerment project worldwide.
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