Monitoring & Analyzing Social Media

Market Research is Changing…Bigtime

Traditional market research, in part, depends on reaching out and engaging consumer and market intelligence and opinion via surveys, polling, focus groups, etc. Often it has been necessary to incentivise the target audience to get them to participate. Offering incentives skews results because the person being surveyed is offering up their point of view primarily to get the prize. As a result you cannot know that what they say is genuine.

Like traditional advertising this approach is a ‘push’ method. Questions are created by allegedly scientifically verified methodology, however there is the possibility that the questions can be structured to lead the response in a desired direction. This may be done consciously or unconsciously- either way the answers, again, are potentially tainted.

In the 1990s firms like the design practice Ideo began doing research by observing behavior without setting up any kind of pre-conceived scenarios. They simply observed patterns and then determined areas where experiences could be streamlined and improved, often in unexpected ways. This observational research could not be ‘lead’ by the researcher.

We now have a wholly new model for market research based on observation of the behavior of millions of people in a new forum, social media. We can listen to conversations, observe trends, determine sentiment and cross-reference these things with demographics. And we can do this on an enormous scale, easily acquiring the thousands of responses required for statistical accuracy, often in minutes and without costly polling, focus groups or surveys. No incentives are required and the results can be parsed without considering what kinds of queries were invented to acquire the response. It’s data, complex data in large sets.

If you are in the research business this is a breakthrough, a breakthrough that cannot be ignored. Your business is going to expand but you are going to have to change your methodology. The good news is that the focus will be on your expertise in interpreting the data. The bad/good news is that your interpretation will be measurable in its accuracy. The revenue will not come from hiring call centers or focus group monitors and marking those services up, it will come from acquiring data, analyzing it and developing measured responses to what you learn, responses that can have an immediate effect.

The power of social media: Julia Nunes

This is the first in a series of casual case studies on how social media can change lives very rapidly in ways that were impossible to imagine only a few years ago.

Julia Nunes is the daughter of a friend of mine- which is how I found this incredible story. She is eighteen, in college and on the way to becoming a superstar musician via social media. As of today her videos on YouTube (I’m embedding the most popular below) have had over 2,114,000 views. There are over 8000 comments on the video I’ve attached. She sells CDs via snailmail from her website and is selling as many as twenty a day. She has had offers from at least three major labels- ironically she doesn’t them. After all why should she give them nine out of the ten bucks she makes on each CD?

It gets better. She is touring this summer, opening for Ben Folds. I ran an SM2 search on her yesterday and found a few things:

• Gawker, a ten star blog in our ranking system, did a glowing post about her yesterday
• The sentiment analysis is overwhelmingly positive
• Twice as many male results as female
• strongest response in the 24-35 age group
• Adding keywords ‘I love Julia Nunes’ because that phrase is very popular in comments and posts

I see bloggers pontificating about how unknown musicians can’t really make money online. I suspect that this is driven by the failure of the record business to understand the power of social media even though they were arguably the first to be impacted by it in the form of peer to peer music sharing sites (an early form of social network). Julia’s talent is the it factor in her success but without the extreme viral nature of social media she would not be where she is now:

Julia Nunes: Into the Sunshine

Her MySpace page

User-Generated Content (UGC) can be a problem- d’oh!

Sarah from ReadWriteWeb has a great piece about the volatility of UGC and the importance of social media monitoring for brand stakeholders. Obviously for us here at Techrigy this is preaching to the converted, but she is absolutely right- you cannot ‘control’ the conversation nor should you try to. Monitor, analyze, listen, join in and participate. Everyone becomes a customer service person in this new paradigm and once again, as always, the customer (user) is always right (even when they’re wrong!).

Get Satisfaction meets Twitter, hooks up

GetSatisfaction.com is a user-generated customer service site. Basically this means that if you have a product, company or service you have questions about you can go there, post your question, answer a question or get an answer from a company rep who is on the service. ‘Open source customer support’, if you will. We’re planning on embedding it in the Community area of our site that we’re building (more on that later).

Twitter, the ubiquitous micro-blog, has hooked up with GetSatisfaction in an interesting way. GetSatisfaction will go out and find Twitter tweets (posts) that reference companies that are in their system and add them to the stream. So if there’s a tweet about Techrigy it should get pulled into the public conversation about Techrigy at GetSatisfaction.

From a publicity perspective this kind of mashup is decidedly a mixed bag. On the one hand you get more information in one place where users specifically go to get that kind of info. On the other hand there is no guarantee that the Twitter comments are relevant in any way to the needs of the users who see them on GetSatisfaction because they’re really just doing keyword searches on Twitter for the company names they track- it’s not contextual and I doubt it ever will be because 140 characters (the Twitter limit) does not provide much in the way of context.

In the real world this doesn’t really matter because once we put our company or product name into the keyword stream for these services it’s no longer ours to control other than taking it down (and I don’t even know if that’s an option). If you’re a PR or brand person you’re going to need to monitor this and hope that good intentions across social media users trump trolls and anonymous cowards.

Utlizing Social Media Monitoring in an Agency Environment

Our primary markets today are PR and marketing agencies who use SM2 to track conversations and reputations for their client brands, people and competitors. The value proposition is in its early stages as social media reaches a critical mass adoption point going beyond the early users and out into the mainstream. We believe we’re at the tipping point right now, the point where the mainstreaming of social media makes it an integral part of everyone’s online experience.

This represents an opportunity and a challenge for brand marketers. We’ve never before had the means of following opinion and sentiment trends in real time. We’ve also never had a situation where a meme (idea) or rumor can travel so fast to so many people. It’s the old Chinese Whisper game scaled to a global level as literally millions of communication channels are added every minute: Twitter threads, blog posts, social network connections and conversations, wiki entries, commenting, review and opinion sites, etc., etc. Your brand is being discussed somewhere right now. Do you know what they are saying?

The first value proposition for your agency is the ability to answer that question affirmatively:

“Yes we know, and we know what they’re saying, who they are, where they are and why they’re talking.”

This is made possible by the search and discovery aspect of social media monitoring.

The second value proposition is answering the client’s obvious question:

“What do we do with this knowledge?”

Your answer may change your entire relationship with your client because this information opens up an entirely new way to participate in brand conversations including:

• Managing negative impressions by reaching out to Influencers
• Identifying new places to get coverage for products and services, places that will not correlate with traditional media planning
• Observe, in real time, as your brands move into new markets and design campaigns to encourage that movement
• Build persona models based on the profiles provided within the analysis tools in the monitoring application
• Provide daily, weekly, monthly activity reports with corresponding analysis and recommendations. This can be automated.
• Track viral marketing efforts in real time and visualize the spread of knowledge across gender, age, location

These are all new services with a lot of value that are far more measurable in their application and ROI than many traditional research models.

We’ve been doing dozens of live demos of SM2 with PR and marketing pros via online conferencing in the last few weeks and the feedback has been extremely interesting as people start brainstorming ways they can utilize the information streams SM2 provides. We are in a constant upgrade cycle as we take suggestions for things to add to our data streams, hear complaints (yes, it’s a work in progress!), get feature requests, etc. We’re also helping our customers analyze their data and, in the process, become power users.

I hope you’ll share your ideas and experiences with us.

The Commenting Challenge

One of the challenges of monitoring social media is tracking and analyzing the comment stream, those long threads of commentary on blogs that often contain important insights, sentiment and viewpoints but are also filled with often useless junk.

This quandary has created a business opportunity with start-ups like Intense Debate and DisQus developing third-party commenting systems that plug-in to most blogging platforms. These services create what is, in essence, a new form of social media. Commenters register with the comment manager and their comments can be followed across whatever blogs they comment on. Readers can vote the comments up or down, creating reputation and providing sentiment indicators, all important values in social media monitoring. These commenters become another stream in the conversation.

We’re working to build more rigorous comment tracking capabilities into SM2, another part of our constant upgrade cycle. Because SM2 is a hosted application most of these upgrades are included for all users at no additional charge.

Welcome to Techrigy’s blog

The usual welcome stuff- we’l be getting this thing together over the next few days so bear with us!