Knowledgeistics

Archive for the ‘Rishu’ Category

Not all companies are in the same boat when thinking about SMMR, and for many senior managers the discussion starts like this: “Are we doing this? Wait -what is this? What can it do?

Social media is no longer new. SMMR enthusiasts has been working hard to keep up with all the information and tools showing up, and growing exponentially, overnight. As your team (and I strongly recommend a team) thinks through SMMR and the benefits it could bring to your company, I’ve tried to put together a list of possible usages that could prove handy.

Following basic marketing principles, SMMR techniques can be divided into two camps (Secondary and Primary). Of course, some techniques will have elements of both as you’ll soon find out. Like most strategic decisions, many companies will benefit from an integrated strategy that utilizes tools from both, but it really comes down to the specific goals, project and budget.

Secondary (Passive) Research

As opposed to Primary (Active) Research methods, these techniques use data already present online, and the trick lies in collecting it and analyzing it. Collecting the data or Data Mining has become easier over time as many tools has surfaced, but analyzing social media data can provide many challenges. Here are some of the communication channels you can use to learn more about a topic.

• What’s popular? With the recent addition of Insights, Google Trends has become more useful than even before for research, expanding from just a novelty to a advanced filters driven technique to find out how people are looking for information – including specific and related keywords. These tools can help segment the information by geographies and time periods, compare search terms and more.
• Ear on the Chatter: The web’s latest star, Twitter’s vast amounts of up-to-the-minute banter can be easily collected using search built-in search tools (not to mention the number of independent websites offering tools to help collect and filter Twitter data). Especially relevant for recent topics, Twitter can help you quickly find out what the community thinks about a topic. Other tools allow you do the same for other popular social media sites including facebook, myspace, youtube etc.
• The emerging experts: Web 2.0 has made it easier than ever before of individuals (and groups) to share their opinions and thoughts establishing their expertise on certain topics – through blogs. While a majority of blogs are run for personal use by non-experts, popular ones have followings that can rival traditional publications such as newspapers and magazines. Many sites, including Technorati provide easy way to find out how certain topics are being mentioned in the blogosphere. For those who want to keep a regular eye on specific keywords, Google Alerts will do the job and alert you on new mentions in websites and blogs.

This is, of course, an incomplete list, but should help you think of the type of information you can collect from the diverse social media community.

Primary (Active) Research

Online research is not new, with hundreds of websites offering the ability to conduct web-based surveys. Though less common, online focus groups and interviews have often replaced their in-person counterparts. But the newest opportunity lies in tapping into these new, always connected channels to do research. Of course, there is the possibility of error due to observer effect, but as opposed to Passive Research, specific questions can be addressed and it’s easier to make sure you talk to ensure you’re talking to the right demographic.

• Tapping current features: Most social media websites offer ways for companies to easily converse with their customers. Unfortunately, this requires forming some kind of relationship with them, whether it is belonging to facebook groups or generating Twitter followers. This can be very difficult, but once established you can easily ask short questions to your consumers and get quick answers.
• Looking ahead: Old dog, new trick: Of course, most market researchers have many follow-up questions and it can be hard to hold a continuous discussion in the above-mentioned method. This leaves room for researchers to use Social Media sites as a way to screen and recruit respondents for more thorough research techniques such as surveys, interviews, focus groups and ethnographic research.

Another undeveloped opportunity lies in forming research panels that can be communicated to via the social media websites and channels, making it possible to control demographics and still conduct fast, cost effective research (I know of very few efforts working on this).

This list is not comprehensive – but hopefully it will get you thinking about all the possibilities out there and if they are actually the right one for you. Have other ideas? Lets hear it in the comments.

Although this post has little to do with the MR part of SMMR (Social Media Market Research), I came across a very creative use of a modern social media tool for marketing and decided to share.

The example is from the webcomic Questionable Content’s usage of Twitter. QC follows the lives of a group of friends in a manner similar to TV sitcoms. While it is common for authors, artists and other creative folks to have their own Twitter accounts, QC creator Jeph Jacques took a different path and made separate Twitter accounts for his fictional characters instead.

The result is that his audience is no longer limited to “experiencing” the characters’ banter in the comparatively traditional medium of his comics, but can now subscribe to them in the way most Twitter-folks are following their friends and family. They can now read the characters’ random thoughts and virtual conversations, adding a whole new dimension to the characters (making them a lot more “real”) and further strengthening the comic’s relationship with its audience.

Many companies and firms are currently using Twitter to pass news and updates about their products, but I can definitely see them extracting value from this strategy to create a very different online presence. Imagine Geico (or the Cave Men from Geico’s commercials) or Burger King’s mascot having their own pages where they posts random thoughts and share a quirky, funny and more human side with followers. Different from typical marketing efforts, this one is not intended to simply pass on directed messages about promotions and new initiatives, but instead have a lasting communication using humor and entertainment in ways similar to viral marketing. And of course, there is no reason why once these channels are made they cannot be used for passing on those messages about promotions and other deals periodically.

Furthermore, as Twitter and its supporting tools upgrade, it may become possible to easily list out the demographics and psychographics of your audience and use that for market research. And that, is how I’m tying all this back to SMMR.

My last post in this series topic talked about leveraging Twitter’s built in search feature to find out what its growing community is saying about any given topic – a cheap and inexpensive way to get quick feedback on a subject of your interest – especially useful for current headliners and hot topics.

While not as clean cut as Twitter search, I’d like to bring attention to another similarly free search feature available to us that help pull summaries or quantify online activity and conversations.

This tool comes from no one else but the company whose goal is to organize the world’s information (quite useful for market researchers) – Google. Largely ignored for commercial purposes, Google Trends does exactly what the name suggests, keep track of hot trending topics, i.e. the most popular search topics at any given time. And like most things Google, this feature includes searchability. A new feature allows you to specify a date and find out the hot topics during that time. I did a quick search for “Guantanamo” and came up with the following result:

The search lists regions and cities that have high search intensity for the term, relevant news stories that came up during the period (helping make sense of peaks) and languages. You also get the ability to limit by region or time range.
An even more sophisticated version of Trends is Google Insights, which lets you compare search terms and chose a number of parameters. I quickly carried out a search comparing “Coke” and “Pepsi” popularity within the past 30 days in the United States. Looks like both terms are almost equally popular. The results also show me regions, related top searches and rising searches.

Given Google’s popularity as the leading search engine, market research could benefit greatly from this tool and find out how people are looking for their brands/topics and related content. For example, I just learnt about throwback (sugar sweetened instead of High Fructose Corn Syrup). Now if I was Pepsi and I had just made an announcement about the same, for a fraction of conventional market research techniques I could find out how consumers are looking for this information and use that to monitor and streamline my communications. And did I mention you can download the results in excel friendly format? Data analyzers rejoice!
The key message here is same as before. Conventional market research tools are powerful methods we’ve used over the year to answer our many questions. But the fast evolving world and its new technologies are opening new channels – for communication and data access, as well as monitoring these channels to do exactly what we all want to – get the answers needed. And now, we can do it quick, and cheap.

One of the still rather underutilized tools of the modern web and its vibrant social community is the ability to monitor what people are talking about. Unfortunately, like many tools it has its limitations and lots of room for more value-added services to take data and convert it to information and knowledge, finally leading to insights. Nevertheless, these new channels present a very cost effective manner of collecting consumer thoughts and opinion.

At the risk of repeating myself (and stating the obvious for some), many popular online communication mediums have built in search-and-monitoring features. Although not leveraged significantly for research, these channels provide an inexpensive way to get some of your market research questions answered, or at the very least learn what people think (or if they even care) about your particular topic of interest.

Let’s start with Twitter. Unless you live under a rock, you’ve noticed the increasing buzz it’s been getting lately as people post their thoughts in 140 characters or less. Ridiculed for many reasons, including the relevance of people’s posts, Twitter has nevertheless grown and started capturing the attention of the corporate world. And something that has really called to marketing folks, especially market researchers is the built in search feature.

The easiest way to illustrate this is with an example. Recently, NBC announced the possible cancellation of the Monday night series Chuck. Now I don’t know much about Chuck but it’s a great and very timely topic for the example.

I searched for Chuck, and here’s what I found.

Some useless content, but also some interesting tidbits. Obviously, some people are concerned about the cancellation (check out the second screenshot). Still others are talking about Subway and Chuck. Now I’m not sure what that’s about – could be a show-related promotion, or could be a user tradition. Either way, could be useful to learn more with additional targeted searches. In the hands of any experienced googler, Twitter can be a powerful and unique way to find out more about your audience.

Another very interesting return is the “XYZ more results since you started searching”. In the seconds it took me to read some of the main comments, there were 16 more comments. Right now the page lists 63 more comments. Wow, this is creating a lot of buzz. While I agree quantity does not signal quality – it would be folly to overlook such a metric. Imagine the uses for monitoring the response to tonight’s episode, or a new ad campaign? Twitter itself, lists some of the trending topics – top ones being related to Swine Flu.

Like most tools, this one is open to interpretation – and its value really only depends on how well someone leverages it. But combined with good analysis, researchers can find out more reading a few pages of twitter posts (selectively) than the transcripts for a focus group. Sure, twitter lacks the ability to control the conversation and answer specific questions, but it is ideal for early stages exploratory research. And who says you can’t start conducting market research with Twitter if you build your own programs? 140 word answers to a survey question – sounds promising for a start.