Researchers at the Stern School of Business have recently partnered with Simplify360, a social business intelligence company that specializes in social media monitoring and analytics. This collaboration allowed for scientific research to analyze how individuals discussed commercials during the Super Bowl via social media.

Simplify360 itself has been monitoring content on social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook. This research looks into the impact of a team’s performance based on consumer reactions to advertisements, which ads have succeeded or failed and how social media affect the way people discuss brands.

Doctoral candidate and researcher Tingting Nian is one of the Stern students working on the research with Simplify360.

“We have been conducting experiments about the Super Bowl to study how to capture brand sentiment through social media conversations,” Nian said. “We’ve tracked a crop of brands that advertised during the Super Bowl across multiple social media channels both before and after this year’s Super Bowl.”

Arun Sundararajan, Stern professor of information, operations and management sciences, spearheaded the partnership after meeting with Bhupendra Khanal, Simplify360’s CEO, at a conference.

“I met [him] two years ago,” Sundararajan said. “Bhupendra followed up after I came back to Stern … Simplify360 was very enthusiastic about collaborating. I really liked their technology.”

Nian is excited about what the findings of this research might yield.

“I hope this research could further our understanding of the complex interplay between social media and brand equity, and also advance the text mining and machine learning techniques that we used for this specific marketing problem,” Nian said.

Stern students, such as senior Jacqueline Mai who has internship experience in the marketing and social media field, will have the opportunity to get involved with the research.

“I think that because using social media as a marketing tool is relatively new, when there’s big events like the Super Bowl it gives companies the opportunity to do research on how they can use it more effectively,” Mai said. “Because it’s so new, people don’t really understand how they can use it effectively yet and whether or not activity on social media leads to an impact in the business sense.”

Stern freshman Rohin Shah is also interested in being involved in this type of research.

“I definitely think Stern students will, and should, get involved with this project,” Shah said. “It’s a great hands-on and real world application of academic study in the corporate world, and allows an extremely lucrative understanding of consumers and their behaviors.”

A version of this article appeared in the Monday, February 10 print version. Anjana Sreedhar is a staff writer. Email her at [email protected].