Entertainment giant Six Flags operates theme parks and attractions throughout North America. Their marketing team relies heavily on data from its web, app and sales platforms to monitor sales and marketing metrics and make informed decisions about park operations and guest experiences.

Six Flags partnered with Google Cloud and Adswerve for a marketing analytics workshop to help identify untapped opportunities in their data. Through that process, the teams pinpointed an initiative to explore expanding Six Flags’ existing social sentiment initiative.

Their legacy sentiment tool was limited to providing a high-level brand score and couldn’t connect to Reddit, which was a big ask from senior leadership. Both the marketing team and the C-suite wanted the ability to go deeper to create and monitor scores by park location and key categories so they could better understand what products and experiences visitors enjoy — and uncover friction points they need to act on.

Ultimately, the Six Flags marketing team wanted to understand their guests’ perceptions of the brand, parks and customer experience to see what works and what doesn’t — and easily share the findings with the C-suite for visibility, investigation and quick action.

Adswerve got to work, diving into Six Flags' robust social sentiment solution needs. The team uncovered that Six Flags wanted to monitor sentiment in five core categories: entertainment, food & beverage, price, cleanliness, wait times and customer experience for each of its 27 parks across five social platforms: Google Reviews, Trip Advisor, Instagram, Facebook and Reddit. Because Six Flags operates parks in Canada and Mexico, they also needed the ability to translate French and Spanish social posts into English.

After thoroughly investigating Six Flags' solution requirements, we began building a new, more robust social sentiment tool. We used Apify to connect the five social sources in Google Cloud Platform’s data warehouse, BigQuery, reducing the need for custom API development and shortening implementation time.

Once we connected the data, our data engineers leveraged the full power of Google Cloud to automate data pulls, transform data (including translating other languages into English), assign sentiment scores and categories, create trend summaries using generative AI and push the synthesized information to Looker in real time. It all happens from one platform with one SQL query.

Six Flags can now view and share a Looker dashboard that includes overall and park-specific sentiment scores and uses generative AI to surface the top five positive and negative trends in a "week in review" summary. They can easily see performance and insights — and the social comments driving them — and monitor them over time.

The power of this data was realized shortly into the project while the dashboard was still in development. A park approached marketing to update its highly trafficked park homepage, theorizing visitors were unhappy with recent maintenance impacting ride availability. Six Flags marketing was able to quickly validate the topic was trending for the park in the initial data sets and move forward confidently with the site update to better set expectations for visitors. And while seasonality and completed maintenance both play a part, the park has seen fewer negative posts and its customer experience sentiment score climb month-over-month since implementing the change.

Today, Six Flags can easily view and understand overall customer sentiment and drill in by park across the five main performance categories in their Looker dashboard to uncover additional opportunities to improve the customer experience. If sentiment drops in a particular park in a specific category over time, they can explore the reasons and quickly remedy them. Similarly, they can identify why sudden dips or spikes are happening and quantify how critical an issue is by how many people are discussing it. The Six Flags marketing team can also see the immediate impact price changes, new or updated rides, events, seasonality and more have on sentiment in the short and long term, and make appropriate changes to their digital marketing programs, park operations and more.

Beyond providing powerful insights, the new solution saves Six Flags time. What used to be a manual process, taking 15 people two to three hours per week each, is now fully automated, incorporates the latest AI technology and is easily shareable with organization stakeholders.

Up next? Six Flags is entering their busy events season and plans to use the new social sentiment tool to see how national events stack up against park-specific ones. They’ll incorporate their learning into their future events strategy. The team also plans to add X (formerly Twitter) to their selected social platform sources.