Knowledgeistics

Posts Tagged ‘social media market research’

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.