Method and apparatus for analyzing and applying data related to customer interactions with social media

An apparatus for quantizing community interactions with social media to understand and influence consumer experiences, the apparatus comprising:

• a processor configured for analyzing posts on social media for use in customer service to improve brand and customer experience;
• said processor configured for determining one or more leading indicators of issues that appear in a consumer contact channel by
• mining said posts,
• extracting topics from said posts,
• selecting those topics that are occurring for a first time or whose frequency of occurring is changing over time,
• calculating a term frequency inverse document frequency (TFIDF) score for each feature in each selected topic,
• assigning a weight to each TFIDF score,
• calculating a score for each of said posts by summing the weighted TFIDF scores of all features within each post, and
• selecting top posts from each selected topic;
• said processor configured for predicting a trend in future consumer contact channel activity based on said leading indicators and the analysis of said posts;
• said processor configured for identifying one or more key influencers from social media;
• and
• said processor configured for, once said key influencers are identified, contacting said key influencers to influence said key influencers.