Knowledgeistics

Archive for the ‘John’ Category

Verify user demographics -- one tweet only

Slate today has a story on the topic of “orphaned tweets” — user accounts that consist of one tweet only.  While Swansburg and Singer-Vine take the article in a hilarious direction by classifying the various kinds of orphaned tweets, the article points to a critical statistic relevant to managers considering social media market research.

A major Harvard study reveals that 10% of Twitter users are responsible for 90% of the site’s traffic.   Add to this an older Nielson study revealing that Twitter has a month-over-month retention rate of just over 40% and the prognosis for creating a wide societal groundswell on twitter is bleak.

This creates an imposing challenge for those looking to create valid demographic samples from Twitter.  One of the most popular objections to SMMR is that it is disproportionately limited to certain demographics.

The relevant question is whether this difficulty will be limited to Twitter or if it creates  problems for the idea of SMMR itself.  My answer has been that it is indeed possible to capture more diverse demographics, but there are three additional considerations.

1. Twitter might not be the best vehicle for capturing insight. Given the low insight available in 140 characters and the difficulty understanding demographics, other social media sites may be more appropriate for market research.  However, if Twitter continues to grow and gains mainstream traction, it’s search functionality will make it an invaluable tool.

2. Use SMMR before target demographics are finalized. Smart market research practitioners will integrate social media market research into their research plans in a way that leverages it’s advantages — casting the widest possible net for insights.  This knowledge should help inform the thinking as you progress to tighter demographics.

Properly understood, social media’s difficulty in expensively isolating demographics is in fact an advantage.

SMMR demos: more than the NPR set

One of the objections I will often hear while discussing social media market research goes like this.  “I understand the potential of SMMR to capture huge amounts of actionable insights, but won’t those insights all be generated by certain non-representative demographics (e.g. younger, coastal, urban)?”  This is definitely a relevant question and a serious concern.

Scott Monty, head of social media for Ford, has part of the answer.  Money statistic: there are 16.5 million moms participating in the blogosphere.  Granted, work needs to be done to further segment the demographic further, but rest assured the percentage of nearly all demos using social media is growing.

One of the hot-button issues in the social media community continues to be whether and how you should use metrics to judge the effectiveness of social media.  This is a critical issue for social media experts (because it is their ticket into companies or up the corporate ladder) and a critical issue for companies, who need to judge an investment in social media in terms of opportunity cost.

I jumped into this hornets’ nest.  Ben Foster argues that social media metrics may delay action and cost your company leadership position in an emerging channel.

What is clear is that the social media community does not lack for metrics that can be applied to social media efforts.  However, what is missing is a discussion on what the right metrics are.

The right place to start is by understanding your company’s goals for social media, starting with the end in mind.  The social media community has a menu of possible and realistic goals for your social media efforts.  If you have already spent a ton of money on social media programs and are just now thinking of how to measure the results, you are behind.  This is how metrics like followers on twitter become germane — because you have come to a point where you need to set metrics that you can achieve.  (Just Google “gain twitter followers” — if twitter followers are the social media currency, this market is seeing hyper-inflation.) It’s comparatively easy for social media experts to create pageviews or followers — that is why they are experts.

One easy method for setting social media metrics: set metrics that are intrinsically valuable for your organization. If you head up a consumer insights department, your metric may be actionable consumer data.  If you are marketing tampons, maybe you want to drive sampling. Your social media metrics should almost always be external to the world of social media — not pageviews or twitter followers, unless your goal really is to increase your brand’s presence among social media experts.

Mashable has a post up discussing Ford’s dominance in the social media space vis-à-vis competitors. The point is that Ford has been massively more successful in creating a social media presence, as measured by:

• Blog mentions
• Videos tagged on YouTube
•  Photos on Flickr

The author is not the only social media expert to use these metrics like these. It’s an understandable temptation – followers, re-tweets, and tags are easy ways to measure progress. However, there isn’t a discussion of why these metrics are valuable to Ford. It’s not clear, after all, that a twitter follower is in any way more likely to buy a new Ford – particularly since a large percentage of these followers are themselves social media experts.

Here are the three most important metrics for social media. If you can’t measure these, and don’t have a line of sight to measuring these, your initiative is in trouble:

1. What did you learn? Understanding your customer or community better is a fantastic goal and one that we fully support. The functionality of social media market research has high value potential, and should be considered a positive ROI investment in the way that focus groups or surveys are generally valued.
2. Who did we reach? If your B2B company has run a successful campaign and generated multiple sales leads, congratulations — you’ve run a successful social media campaign. However, if you have no idea how reaching more targets impacts your top line, it might be time to rethink your strategy. And if you’re having a hard time knowing if you’re reaching customers or just other marketers it is definitely time to rethink the strategy. 
3. What was the ROI? If you are able to measure a direct top-line result of your campaign you’ve solved the paradox of social media marketing. You did it!

As with any initiative, understanding the rules for success is critical. Make sure you agree to them upfront with your social media consultant.

Stephen Baker has an article out in Business Week advising companies, against the advice of many others in social media, to not start a proprietary corporate social community.

Money:

So instead of spending a fortune to draw employees, customers, and clients to your site, how about meeting them where they already are for free? Chances are lots of them are among the 200 million on Facebook and the 30 million on LinkedIn. And more of them are Twittering every day.

Stephen has step-by-step directions for leveraging facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to collect some preliminary insights into what the social media world is saying about your company. He oversimplies a bit — there are definitely places where companies can benefit greatly from having a proprietary community (a topic I’ll be covering in some depth later this week). However, no company should start with a proprietary system without first taking the 2 hours to follow Stephen’s advice.

Much of the talk here and elsewhere about social media market research revolves around a thorough analysis of the larger social networking sites – twitter, facebook, and maybe one or two others. This is, certainly, where one can go for the quickest overview of the pulse of the market.

However, the smart SMMR company/consultancy is constantly adding sources to their stable. Think of an SMMR database of sites like you do your RSS reader. You should constantly be adding more sources and giving them a test run. Great blogs are added to your regular rotation, while those that aren’t adding anything new to the discussion will be removed. Likewise, startups encorporating social media content should be discovered and watched for their emerging data potential.

Mashable today features a travel recommendation website called Joobili that takes into account your desired activities, budget, and time frame and makes several trip recommendations. Aside from being a good idea, this site, if it takes off, will be a goldmine of market research data as it includes robust user reviews and other consumer-generated content. Joobili is exactly the type of site that smart market research managers will be mining for travel data, especially for a tech-literate demographic.

As anyone who reads Mashable knows, there are a ton of these sorts of startups — make sure to keep your ears open to constantly cycle data sources into (and occasionally out of) your database.

Gartner research reports that half of all social media marketing initiatives in Fortune 1000 companies will fail. This is because these companies are approaching social media as a tool to look for a strategy.

The social media world is always buzzing about epic social media failures (no need to call out names, just run a google search). And even the better-received experiments seem to only appeal to other social media gurus.

One advantage of launching a social media research project, rather than an expensive, all-out social media marketing initiative, is that your organization gains massive experience and insight without putting the power of your brand on the table.

At the outset of this project, we want to lay out why social media market research (SMMR) is a valid area of interest. After all, there are thousands of emerging trends you could be spending your precious blog time understanding – what sets SMMR apart?

More importantly, especially if you are a consumer insights/market intelligence/marketing manager, why should you care about this project?

There are three central reasons.

1) The price of qualitative market research has become astronomical. Think about this one. You want to get four groups of 8-10 young men who are college graduates and own at least one video game console (or single moms, or women 50+ years, etc.) in a room together for 2 hours and ask them questions. Intuitively, how much do you think this should cost?

If the answer isn’t $15,000+, we’re on the same page. The costs of traditional focus group research (not to mention IDI’s or “ethnographies”) has become astronomical.

In the age of Facebook, Twitter, and iPhone apps, is paying a focus group call center really the best way to find participants?

2) Gathering a group of pre-selected individuals to whom you will ask a list of pre-selected questions is a fundamentally flawed research model. The central goal of qualitative research is to understand the real lives of your current or potential customers. This is harder in focus groups because you are controlling the conversation, not them. Inherently, active observation biases the results. This explains the extraordinary popularity of “ethnographic” market research, which few academic anthropologists would recognize.  However, we are now fortunate that, for many demographics, our customers are sharing their thoughts, reactions, and needs (for free!) in their native environments.  Key caveat: this is not to discredit the importance or usefulness of traditional research methods, but only to show that they certainly have no monopoly over methodological rigor.

3) SMMR makes it easy to expand your research universe without exploding research costs and timelines. For example, say Serta is undertaking a study on the mattress market.  However, they want to expand the focus to understand not only the existing market options but also what “rest” itself means to its potential customers.  With traditional research methodologies, the team would have to construct elaborate screeners focused on certain demographics, with every effort limited by the fact that they will need to pay $300-$400 for every contact point.  Were they to leverage SMMR, they could harvest from a much larger pool, and after a thorough analysis of the data, understand from the universe of options where further research is warranted and what the key demographics are.

Two lessons here: A) SMMR can shrink your research costs and timelines and produce more useful results; B) When you let the market lead (instead of your pre-determined demographic screens and focus group guides), you open a world of possibilities.

As we continue this project we will be testing these benefits, and hopefully adding others.