EU FP7 Linked2Media Project coordinated by TURSAB (Association of Turkish Travel Agencies) was completed successfully by 12 project partners from different European Countries and the final meeting and the workshop were organized on Sep 18-19, 2014 in Istanbul. As a result of the Project, a platform which provides Brand and Market Sector Reputation Analysis by using open linked data exracted from social media has been developed.
Linked2Media (http://linked2media.eu/), an Open Linked Data Platform for Semantically-Interconnecting Online, Social Media Leveraging the Corporate Brand and Market Sector Reputation Analysis and Response Optimization Services) is an FP7 Capacities Programme Project which was funded by the European Commission within the Research for SME associations 2011 Call. The Project was coordinated by TURSAB (Association of Turkish Travel Agencies) and 12 Project partners from different EU countries such as Italy, Spain, Greece, Ireland, Romania and Bulgaria worked together during 3 years and achieved the goals of the Project. The Project ended on Sep 30, 2014. As a result of the Project, the innovative Linked2Media Platform has been developed where SMEs create the analysis of their/competitors’ brand reputation in 7 different languages (English, Turkish, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Bulgarian and Romanian) by social media resources such as Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, sector related blogs and etc.
During the Project, 5 workshops were organized by SME Association partners (TURSAB, BCCI, SEVT and CTCR) in order to promote the Linked2media Project and its results to the SME members, to present the features, usage, benefits and competitive advantages of the Linked2media Platform and to collect the feedbacks and the opinions of the SME members about the performance of the Linked2media platform and its usability. Their last one, the Linked2media Final Workshop was organized by TURSAB on Sep 19, 2014 in Lutfi Kirdar Congress and the travel agency members were invited.
During the event, Linked2Media platform was presented and demonstrated to TURSAB travel agency members. After the presentation and demonstration, interested participants tested the platform by themselves while evaluating its usability through the paper-based evaluation tasks. They were also encouraged to answer the evaluation questionnaire on the Linked2Media platform.
The workshop started with the opening speech of the President of TURSAB, Mr. Basaran Ulusoy. The president pointed out how Linked2media Platform will be useful for the members of TURSAB during his speech. Then, the Project Coordinator Leyla Arsan made a presentation about the project and Esen Kunt from Botego presented the features and usage of the Linked2media platform. In order to encourage the travel agency members on use of the platform, Alexandra Tudorache from EMI, which is a travel agency and one of the partners of the project, shared her experiences on testing of the platform and the benefits that she obtained when using this platform to measure the reputation of her company in social media. Sinan Halic from TURSAB who has also worked actively in the project as a test user, described the benefits of the platform.
Afternoon session, the travel agencies had chance to test the platform according to the scenario document given them by the project team and then they have evaluated the platform. In general, it was a very successful workshop that achieved its goals. Most of the users considered themselves as experienced and technical enough, especially in using social media and web-based applications. In consistent with this statement, most of them found the platform easy to use as well as to operate on it. Most participants believed that using the Linked2Media platform in their marketing campaigns would improve their brand value while they intended to use the Linked2Media platform to manage their company’s brand reputation in the future.
The Linked2Media Platform will be available for everyone as a service of SME Association partners of the project soon. Stay tuned and follow us through the following links:
Project website: http://linked2media.eu/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Linked2Media
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Linked2Media @Linked2Media, #Linked2Media
