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Maria Ogneva
Maria Ogneva is the Director of Social Media at Attensity the leader in Customer Experience Management software applications that generate value from unstructured text. Maria educates the market on best practices in social media monitoring, measurement, engagement, social CRM and customer experience management.
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Getting Started With Social Media Research ...a beginners guide By Maria Ogneva - 16th September, 2010
News flash: people are talking about you in social media. They are also talking about your competitors. And just as importantly, they are talking about their needs, and the ability (or inability) of current solutions to meet these needs. In other words, they are giving you the type of feedback that marketers and researchers would kill for! And you didn’t even have to ask them for it. If you haven’t bought into the importance of social media research, here are a few advantages to start with: it can give you more customized insights than secondary research, a larger sample size than primary research, and ability to capture unaided insights, as they happen.
How it works:
Typically you can start by specifying keywords or combinations of keywords and phrases, as inputs into monitoring and measurement platforms. The system then goes out and looks for occurrences of your keywords in specified channels (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, forums, etc). It then analyzes the volume and sentiment of these mentions, and bubbles up key trends and influencers within your buckets of data. This is why structuring the right keyword query is paramount. After your platform goes out and gets the data for you, you can pass it through a variety of analysis mechanisms, ranging from the simpler tag cloud mapping to more complex tasks of parsing and text analytics.
Is it primary or secondary research?
Is social media research primary or secondary research? I gave it some thought today, and decided that I see as a blend of both. It’s a bit of secondary because it allows you to collect data that’s out there in the public domain, where you don’t have to actively ask responders to answer your questions. However, you get the richness of actionable insights identifying the use cases, use patterns, feelings, sentiment, which used to be possible with primary research only. I think of it as an equivalent of being a fly on the wall while your customers and non-customers talk about you and your competitors, without introducing any of the biases that come with conducting focus groups. Let’s take a closer look…
Social media research has elements of secondary research:
If you consider secondary research, social media research is similar in that it allows you to analyze data that’s been created already, while allowing for the flexibility of formulating your research design, by specifying a query. Typically secondary research has laid the groundwork for primary research, whereas primary filled the gaps. It wasn’t as useful or specific as primary research – it could tell you how much people spend on smartphones, but it wouldn’t tell you what people actually thought of the iPhone. Social media helps overcome these handicaps by providing actionable results in real-time, customized to solve your research problem.
Social media research has elements of primary research:
Traditionally primary research allows for more customization; ranging from focus groups and surveys, to interviews and observation, you gleaned insights (quantitative and qualitative). These insights help you answer business problems, such as “How should I price this product? How can I make it more usable? How can I prioritize my feature list?” Social media research is similar to primary research in that it’s very tailored to what the organization is trying to find out. You can have a question in mind, and learn what people are saying and how they really feel. It’s also cheaper than some of the traditional research (such as focus groups) and provides real-time data with no aided response bias.
They can coexist:
Social media research, especially with its rising usage patterns, is an undeniable source of market intelligence. However, I am not announcing traditional research dead and I am not advocating throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater by shifting all attention into social and away from traditional. I believe both have a place, especially in a large organization, and should coexist harmoniously.
Let’s say you are a global athletic shoe manufacturer and are considering introducing a new style. You can do standard secondary research to figure out how big your market is, determine price elasticity of demand in various geographies, and zero in on the countries where you can make that product introduction. Secondly, you listen to what people are saying in social media about shoes, that type of shoe in particular, as well as the rest of your shoe portfolio, and your competitors’ products. You are continuously monitoring, as well as capturing relevant tweets across a specified time horizon to understand what drives demand and satisfaction. Finally, you fine-tune your shoe design, prioritizing and de-prioritizing some features, identifying price points that may work. Finally, you clarify questions you may have with surveys, and get feedback about the shoe prototype in a focus group setting.
A couple of things to keep in mind:
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Monitor and measure: you should be monitoring and measuring social media at the same time. I wrote an article about the difference between the two. Although measurement will be more useful in market research, as it helps you analyze data en masse, ongoing monitoring is also useful if you want to dig further into a tweet in real-time.
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Reliable data for cheaper: Social media research allows you access to a much larger sample size than you would get in primary research, and at a much lower price point. Additionally, it reduces many of the biases (such as aided response bias) inherently present when you ask someone what they think about X, Y and Z. You basically get to find out what they think without asking them. However… all of this brings its own set of challenges. As the number of conversations increases, so does the noise. And as everyone says what’s on his / her mind, the need for interpretation becomes highly pronounced.
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Immediacy: Social media research has a leg up on traditional research in that you can design it, implement it and gather findings on the fly, reducing the risk of your data getting stale. Furthermore, because with social media research you can surface issues in real-time, it can often bring issues to the forefront that traditional methods haven’t discovered yet. For example, one of our clients uses social media to identify emerging issues, which tend to manifest themselves in traditional support later. This way, support teams can be prepared, website can be updated, and product enhancements can be deployed.
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Semantic analysis is a must for unstructured text: There’s a lot of data out there, and most of it is qualitative. Unstructured text is notoriously hard to analyze. Therefore, you need to arm yourself with top of the line text analytics to help you dig in and create actionable insights out of this ever-growing ocean of data.
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Success with the right keywords: When specifying what you want to look at, here are some useful keywords that you should always look at: your brand name(s), your product name(s), your competitors’ brand and product names, industry terms, product category names.
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Using social media research to augment your traditional market research will position you as the leader in understanding what your customers and, just as importantly, what your non-customers want. Just remember, insights are just the first step. What you do with those insights – that’s the art of it!
Maria Ogneva
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