Understand Social Feedback data collection

This topic provides a basic understanding of the underlying process and architecture that makes it possible for Medallia Social Feedback to collect social data to troubleshoot issues and understand the mechanics of Social Feedback at a big-picture level.

For more information, see Advanced Social Feedback configuration.

Social media server

The Social media server (SMS) stores all social data. The SMS is an external server that is accessed by all instances using Social Feedback. All social data is managed in the Social media server, then replicated as survey data in Experience Cloud.

The Social media server stores location information (such as name, address, brand, industry, and geolocation) in a property reference, which come from multiple data sources:

  • Experience Cloud — Unit information from Experience Cloud report of each company. Experience Cloud sends updates to the Social media server on an ongoing basis, whenever new units are added.

  • STR (Smith Travel Research) — A third-party database of property references for the hospitality industry. Social Feedback updates from STR once per month.
    Important: Social Feedback uses STR data and no longer updates North Star data.

  • AggData — A third-party database of property references for the retail and auto industries. Social Feedback imports updates from AggData on an as-needed basis.

Property references from each data source are kept separate, so in some cases, the same unit information is located in multiple property references. In this example, Experience Cloud and Smith Travel Research have a property reference for the Serenity Hotel Palo Alto location:

There is a completely separate property reference table for each data source (i.e. there is one set of property references for Medallia Experience Cloud and another set for STR). As a result, there can be duplicate property references across these tables.

Property references are matched to a canonical property. Canonical properties form the primary list of unique units that Social Feedback collects data about. There is only one canonical property for each location, but multiple property references can point to the same canonical property. In addition, each canonical property is associated with URLs of social media sites (known as Social sources).

Canonical properties are linked to both property references and URLs.

Experience Cloud's process for collecting information on the social media server involves:

  1. Map units

  2. Source discovery

  3. Feedback collection

The process for collecting and social data and generating reports involves: 1. Mapping all units for customers and rivals. 2. Mapping URLs for all units across review sites. 3. Collecting reviews from the URLs. 4. Cleaning reviews and checking for duplicates. 5. Adding social data into existing survey-related reports, as well as rival reports.

After initial setup, Social Feedback collects social media reviews on an ongoing basis, and unit information is updated as necessary. Experience Cloud updates reports and triggers alerts within a few hours after new reviews are imported.

If a property is removed from the Social media server, data about this property remains in Experience Cloud. On the other hand, if the corresponding Unit is removed from Experience Cloud, all related reviews are junked and are no longer stored on either server.

Map units

When enabling Social Feedback to a company's configuration, the first goal is to add information about the company's locations to the Social media server. Social Feedback maps some Unit information (Name, Address — Street address, City, State/Country — Latitude, Longitude, and Industry) from Property references to a Canonical property.

Property references from each data source are compared to each other during the matching process.

This Canonical property is updated with new property references during the matching process. This process determines whether a property reference coming from a data source is related to an existing canonical property, or whether Social Feedback needs to create a new canonical property.

New property references are added to the Social media server when:

  • New units are added to Experience Cloud that has Medallia Social Feedback.

  • Third-party data sources (Smith Travel Research and AggData) are updated.

During the property matching process, Social Feedback categorizes incoming property references (Units) into four categories:

  • No match — When there is no match between the Unit and any canonical properties, the SMS uses the information from the property reference to create a new canonical property unless the unit name and address is incorrect or incomplete. For more information, see Missing links screen.

  • Automatic match — When there is a match between the Unit and a canonical property, the SMS maps the property reference to the corresponding canonical property. For a match to happen, units must have their names and address in the correct format, as established in Social Feedback collection.

  • Weak match — When a canonical property is matched with low certainty (a weak match), the match is verified by humans.

  • Ambiguous match — When more than one canonical property matches the information from the unit (an ambiguous match), the match is verified by humans.

An incoming property reference is compared to the canonical properties.

Source discovery

During Automatic discovery, Medallia Social Feedback automatically finds the web addresses (URLs) of the social media sites (sources) for each unit and associates them with the appropriate canonical property.

Initially, the names and URLs for each canonical property are sent to the Google Search API (or Google Places API for Google locations if no URLs are provided), which attempts to identify the relevant social source for each unit. Source discovery triggers automatically, with a given threshold based on source priority.

To verify that each source is correct, Social Feedback attempts to match the name and URLs with the name and address of the canonical property:

  • Automatic name and address match — URLs from confidently-matched sites are mapped to the canonical property.

  • No match between name and address — URLs from non-matches are discarded.

  • Ambiguous name and address match — Ambiguous matches are resolved by humans.

For a list of the sites that Social Feedback collects, see Social Feedback sources.

Feedback collection

Social Feedback collects reviews for all units and rivals (both at a unit and brand level). Data for company units is collected twice a day, and data for rivals is collected biweekly.

For more information, see Data collection frequency and Remove feedback from Experience Cloud.

Note: If a property reference (such as STR) indicates that a property is closed, the Social media server stops collecting reviews for that property, but existing reviews will remain Experience Cloud. However, when a unit is closed in Experience Cloud it is discarded and there us no way to keep reviews.

Social Feedback data translation

Social Feedback shows reviews in their original language, which are not translated. If Medallia Text Analytics is available, reviews are tagged with the corresponding Topics in the review language.

Test data collection

Go through these steps to verify feedback is collected into Experience Cloud:

  1. From Responses report, select Past 3 days for Timeperiod field and All Review sites for Feedback type.

    Timeperiod field with a value of 'Past 3 days'; Feedback type filed with a value of 'All Review sites', and Property field.

  2. Order results by date and check the review volume. Note that reviews may take up to 24 hours to appear since they go through moderation and publishing from the source sites.

  3. To check a specific unit, such as during a UAT process, choose the unit in the Property field.

  4. After verifying there reviews are being collected, go through the steps in Auditing data collection coverage to check source collection for units.

When testing Medallia Social Feedback, consider:

  • Sandbox instances — Social Feedback works in a "read-only mode" in sandboxes, that is, any configuration done in Experience Cloud is not synchronized with the Social media server. Additionally, neither Rival lists nor their Rival reports are available. Only up to 150,000 records are shown, including both survey and review records.

  • QA instances — You can test all Social Feedback features using engineering QA instances with synthetic data. These instances are fully integrated with the Social media server.

  • Management responses — Only available in QA (Denver) or demo instances.