Analytical Tools for Business Purposes Social media has grown to become a very important source of information for travelers to make decisions regarding destinations and hospitality services.
Particularly, online product reviews such as those in websites TripAdvisor and Yelp have become essential electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) and have shown to influence consumer behavior and, as result, generate impact on business performances. Therefore, there is an increasing need for businesses to understand what consumers are sharing with each other through these online reviews. In this exercise, you are expected to apply a text analytics tools, i.e., word cloud generator, to online reviews and interpret the results from the business perspective. Specifically, you need to do the following: Identify a real business you are interested in; Propose an idea to use Word Cloud Generator (https://www.wordclouds.com/) for business purposes; Collect data (>100 reviews), run analyses (show graphs), and interpret results (what it means); Make recommendations to the business. Note: You need to provide the rationale for the data you select. There are different ways to enter the data, how you want the data to be processed (e.g., removing stopwords etc), and how you want the program to display the word clouds. You should explain these specifications in the paper. There are different ways to use the tool, e.g., to understand what people talk about the business in negative vs. positive reviews, how does the focal business compare with its competitors, etc. You need to be creative! A few requirements for the paper: Use a cover page, the main body (consisting of sections) and reference page to organize your paper. Try to limit the main body to five pages of actual text (including tables, charts, and figures). The paper must be double-spaced and written in twelve-point type with standard margins. The page limit does not include the cover page, a reference page (if applicable), and/or any attachments you would like to include. You must reference all of the sources you cite in the paper. An APA guideline has been posted on the Canvas site. Your work will be evaluated based upon: Description of the business and its environment (20 points) Analyze its market characteristics (30 points) Word cloud ideas (80 points) Communication (20 points): format (e.g., cover page, page number), page limit, grammar, organization, etc.
