Brandwatch’s Classroom offering is about offering students the chance to get started in their careers with confidence in using the tools of digital consumer intelligence and knowing how to leverage consumer insights.

We recently spoke with Professor Ari Lightman of Carnegie Mellon University to understand why and how he teaches his students how to use Brandwatch products in his multi-disciplinary, experiential Measuring Social class.

Powerful and insightful

Professor Lightman’s course is open to everyone at the university, so his class has to cater for students focused on disciplines as varied as design, business, data analytics, policy, computer science, and traditional management. His students are headed out on a whole variety of career paths.

And that’s why he loves Brandwatch. His students can pull powerful insights quickly and simply, and those insights can relate to almost any field.

“We have used several different social listening and intelligence platforms in the past but have found that Brandwatch provides the combination of a powerful social listening platform with tools and features to uncover sentiment, trends, and images to create comprehensive stories of online consumer conversations.”

They’ve used the platform to create some incredible work.

They’ve done the basics, like assessing how effective advertising campaigns have been on social platforms, and working out how to implement more efficient targeting.

But they’ve also gone much further. Professor Lightman’s class developed a set of algorithms using social data pulled from Brandwatch to discover the likelihood of one of the world’s largest car rental agencies running out of stock.

Getting students on board

Professor Lightman told us that students find searching for data simple on the platform.

“Students find the platform intuitive and easy to get up to speed with to run complex queries to find pertinent social information.”

In particular, his students value the platform for its flexibility. He said: “Students really enjoy the intuitive features found in Consumer Research, especially Custom Classifiers and tools that help identify how online groups are responding to campaigns, brand messaging, and social sentiment”.

He continued: “Students also use the topic wheel as a means to identify affinity between different audiences and build personas associated with online groups to understand engagement and interconnectedness.”