2014 GRC Technology Innovation Award: Lexer Enables Organizations to Monitor and Manage Brand & Reputation in Moments of Crisis

The 2014 GRC Technology Innovation Awards was filled with competition.   Nominations increased to 62 over last year’s awards, and fifteen winners were selected.  GRC 20/20 looked through all of the submissions, asked for clarification where needed, and selected 15 recipients that demonstrated outside the box thinking in taking GRC in new directions to receive this year’s award.

Lexer Enables Organizations to Monitor and Manage Brand & Reputation in Moments of Crisis

Lexer’s innovation is a solution to integrate and visualize streams of data to manage reputation risk across social media content.  Lexer does this by producing highly accurate geographic insights used as the conduit between the various data sources such as census, socio-economic, transactional, CRM, and customer support.. This unified data set offers businesses a new perspective on reputation and brand risk since it offers a wealth of detail on data previously inaccessible.

In 2013, Lexer invested greatly in the enrichment process of the data it collects and, as previously outlined, the introduction of geographical enrichment as a highly accurate and reliable conduit between many external data sources. Using these new data sets, Lexer now has the ability to create complex personas based on behavioral, social and economic profiles – ensuring their data sets align with brand segments, key audiences and most importantly, stakeholders. Whether it’s in prediction, reaction or reflection, Lexer’s enriched data sources give businesses a new perspective on the way consumers react, engage and change in brand incidents. Moments of crisis regularly impact organizations, digital media has accelerated the speed at which information about a crisis can spread and during times of crisis, poor decisions are made due to inexperience, pressure and the lack of hard data. These poor decisions result in enhanced financial, reputational, health, safety and environmental risks.

Lexer uses integrated datasets to deliver routine reports on the details of incidents and the aftermath that includes influencer analysis, trend data and trajectories, topic and sentiment analysis – but most intriguingly, they are able to track the incident right to the root.

Lexer’s prime technical innovation is the ability to collect, process and unify unstructured data sources in real time. The technical focus for 2013 was to identify and develop into the core of the Lexer platform a common point of reference in which other data sources; such as CRM, Transactional and Socio-Economic data could integrate.

After extensive research and prototyping it was clear that geospatial detail was required to create a clear conduit between sources. As such, Lexer invested its efforts in being able to determine the location of social media users even when they didn’t share details such as longitude and latitude. Their enrichment process uses Machine Learning and Real-Time Data Processing infrastructure to analyze language, physical reference points and trends for each piece of data consumed by the Lexer platform. They are now able to obtain 3rd party data and integrate that geospatial data to map once abstract sources together, allowing more specific querying of data, clearer segmentation that’s relative to the organization’s segments, and insights that take in the whole picture. Their core ability is to help organizations understand the cost of making a wrong decision.

To learn more about the GRC 20/20 2014 GRC Innovation Awards and other recipients, please visit this post: GRC 20/20 Announces 2014 GRC Innovation Award Recipients