How to Make a Digital Newsroom Dashboard with TIBCO Simplr
Blog: The Tibco Blog
Our Public Relations team has many channels of data to analyze and use for reporting, but they were unconnected, and there was no one place where they could go to access all the information they needed. As as result, the team spent a lot of time gathering and distributing the data each week from various applications, as well as creating and distributing various reports. The team was looking for a way to automate these tasks so they could focus on more strategic and interesting PR work.
Factors critical to their success were:
- An easy-to-use tool that a non-technical team could use
- Everything in the cloud
- Robust connectivity to the tools that collect and house important information
Using TIBCO Simplr, we created a centralized “Digital Newsroom Dashboard” for visualizing the performance and activity of web and social properties. We built a Simplr flow that connects:
- Google Analytics for web traffic and blog views
- RSS feeds for product and company mentions in the news
- Twitter analytics for tweets and mentions
Then, we added a TIBCO Spotfire connector to our flow as well as filters to specify the data that moves. Simplr feeds the web and social data into Spotfire, creating a dashboard of visualizations that is automatically updated.
The PR team developed the requirements and worked with marketing operations to generate this mega flow, and the PR team learned quickly how to modify the flow and maintain it themselves.
ROI
At this point, the PR team estimates the flow saves them at least 2 hours per week. We estimated ROI based on what it would have cost to build this dashboard without using TIBCO Simplr. That works out to 250 develop hours billed at $200 p/h which could be $50k if we had commissioned an external company to build this. With Simplr Pro at $25 per month, the ROI was over 10x.
What did we learn?
There is a lot of business value in bringing disparate data sources together to create more robust reporting. Additionally, more than ever, data is distributed across many cloud based applications. However, even when applications expose API’s it can be daunting for less technical folks to access the information. So these opportunities are often missed.
- A tool like Simplr is a swiss army knife for Marketers. To obtain the most value, be creative!
- Being able to do light-weight transformations on data is really important given the variance in data formatting across applications.
You can do this too! Get started and try Simplr and Spotfire Cloud for free with this template (sign up or sign in required). Don’t forget to check out the video on the Digital Newsroom Dashboard below:
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