Posts Tagged ‘consumer research’

Biz360 10th Anniversary Interview Series – Interview with Danielle Sherman, Account Manager Extraordinaire

Danielle Sherman understands what it takes to ensure that our clients are using their Biz360 tools to their maximum potential. She is an educator, a fixer, an interpreter of data and a “topic query whisperer”. After we sign up a large enterprise client, it’s the services team, which Danielle is a part of, which makes the social media motor hum daily.

We index such tremendous amounts of data that we want to ensure that our clients can get their hands around their very large numbers of mentions. As easy as our product is to use, our clients have been known to build some very complex topics. And that’s where we come in: from complex topic creation, to custom report generation and  social media education, our services team is here to help unlock the full capabilities of our platform.

Having come from “PR 1.0″, Danielle has a unique perspective on how social media has changed the conversation, PR, marketing, and what our clients are looking for. Take a look at her interview below:

To find out how Biz360 can power your insights, visit us here, or get started here. Thanks for visiting!

If you have been following this series of events then you know that for 3 weeks running Biz360 used social media measurement to successfully make Amercian Idol contestant predictions.   

Yesterday at 3:00 pm when we needed to make our finale prediction announcement, there was less than a 1% difference between the final contestants, Adam and Kris.  Many were saying it was too close to call.  But we had promised a prediction and a number of colleagues and clients were making inquiries – we didn’t want to let them down.  After all, the show can’t announce a draw now can they? 

While the difference between the two contestants was small enough that an accurate statistical prediction was impossible due to the limitations of margin of error – we went ahead and predicted Adam Lambert as the winner based on the data we had at the time.

What made this week’s prediction different than those in previous weeks? 

This week was particularly challenging because not only was it an impossibly close margin, but 40% of the source coverage being measured came from Microblogs (mostly Twitter).  The week before for example, consisted of closer to 20% of Twitter-type coverage.  Microblogs are about as real time as it gets, which means it is a dynamic moving target, evolving as public opinion takes shape.

We started out this exploration by asking the question:  Can social media predict American Idol?  At this point if we look back at yesterday’s positive and neutral coverage, Kris did wind up slightly ahead of Adam.   Adam landed at a share of 49.34% while Kris was at 50.66%.  Overall, we believe we have demonstrated that it absolutely can. 

As a side note, a number of people were requesting a Dancing With The Stars finale prediction also.  Yesterday before the finale show, we made a correct prediction analysis for the twitter community using our Community Insights solution. Even though Shawn Johnson was the expected underdog, her social media coverage lead us to predict her to win.

American Idol was a fun vehicle to prove the concept — but imagine the applications for companies.  Throughout this exploration, people continue to be amazed with the idea that we can take thousands and thousands of relevant aggregated posts and conversations, and very quickly consolidate them into real, usable data.   The time period between the performance show and results show is only 24 hours.   Also, the people making these posts are handraisers, volunteering their unsolicited feedback.  So the quality and bias of the consumer opinions is minimal when compared to traditional research methods of gathering feedback.  Our clients are benefitting from this streamlined path to their customers by using Biz360 solutions like Community Insights and Opinion Insights to listen. 

Key issue with marketing research.  Overcoming a common, but frequently overlooked, weakness in many marketing research studies — many marketing research professionals go to great lengths to discover what are the right issues andthe right topics for their research studies.  Such exploratory research may utilize tools such as focus groups, diads, or simply chatting with the right people or examining the right blog. 

Unfortunately many other researchers do not make this level of investment beforehand.  Instead, they draft their questionnaires or moderators’ guidelines, plunge ahead, and then proceed to analyze the resultant data and make a myriad of recommendations.  Results which may turn out to be entirely off the mark or just plain wrong in key respects.    This reminds me of a play on an old adage:  “Garbage in and gospel out.”   Partly, this is why many marketing and business professionals who need and value this kind of insight have such a low regard for expending resources on marketing research – a low ROI.

A good beginning.  Beginning in the first half of the 20^th century, marketing research began to take on the guise of science, employing sophisticated sampling techniques, strict screening of study participants, well-designed questionnaires, and complex statistical techniques that produced accurate results.  But the latter part of the same century saw the growth of dual working households, the spread of telephone answering machines and of mobile phones.  All of these new-found obstacles to interviews were coupled with a proliferation of telephone surveys and direct marketing callers which dramatically and adversely impacted people’s willingness to participate in a survey. 

The end of the beginning.  In part, to keep up with the need for marketing research information, comparatively easy to arrange online focus groups and online surveys arose followed by the growing construction of large panels of people who would participate in research studies for a fee or reward.  .  At the same time, marketers grew leery of “professional participants”, people that marketers were unsure of who they were or their appropriateness in participating in their studies.  And concerns grew for the reliability, accuracy and projectability of information derived in this manner.   

A new opportunity to derive consumer insight is emerging.   Never before has the voice of the consumer been so accessible and transparent as that contained in online social media and product reviews.  Now actual buyers of products and services are talking with the online world in general, other prospective purchasers in particular, and you, their marketer – if you will listen.

These “hand-raisers” will freely provide you  the strengths and weaknesses of products, your competitors’ products, the means to better position these products with them via their own language used in their conversations, and a host of other valuable competitive differentiators.  Recently, in October 2008, I was involved in an Opinion Insights research study for two prominent builders of the latest craze in notebooks, the light-weight, inexpensive, “netbook”.  We were hearing early on that many of the first wave of purchasers were displeased with the significantly under-powered systems (RAM and CPU) in spite of the low prices and extraordinary portability of their new netbooks.  The manufacturers of these new systems were essentially unaware that a brewing adverse backlash within the marketplace could be building.  Product marketers are beginning to introduce newer, more robust netbooks albeit with trade-offs at least in terms of higher price points.

Marketers and researchers are only just beginning to tap into this new source of consumer information.  By consolidating the thousands of online opinions, researchers can lay much of the groundwork and enable traditional research and product planning to be as pointed and efficient as possible.  We are at the early stages of effectively promoting a dialogue between consumers and marketers and maintaining the trust and convenience that existed for all before the end of the beginning of marketing research described above.

While there’s been a lot of talk about leveraging social media for marketing, I find it surprising there has been so little discussion about using it as a source for consumer research.

One important aspect of social media, online consumer reviews, is growing by leaps and bounds; and this product feedback is available right in front of us on an ongoing basis from thousands of public sources. There are now effective solutions to aggregate and measure product opinions and deliver insightful market research and analysis with competitive and actionable findings.

As a case in point, Las Vegas Sands Corporation is an example of an innovative company that is putting this new form of customer research to test. With the entire Las Vegas market challenged by a tightened economy and increased competition for travelers’ dollars, LVSC enlisted Biz360 to gather insights from online traveler reviews to better understand guest expectations and be more responsive to them. Biz360’s new Opinion Insights solution uses advanced data aggregation and analytics technology to mine online reviews from travel sites like Expedia, Fodors, and Forbes Traveler — and many more.

Based on the results delivered, Las Vegas Sands Corp. has already undertaken several follow-up initiatives to improve customer experience. Biz360 was able to deliver an amazingly granular level of detail about LVSC’s properties as well as their competitors. Among the findings from the initial report, it was clear that customers loved the pool at the new Palazzo, however some customers specifically brought up the lack of shade as an area of concern. Another finding indicated that guests wanted to avoid long lines at check-in. In response, the property is installing removable satellite check-in desks during busy days, and ensuring that guests are better informed about which pool offers the most shade.

Aside from opportunities for improvement, they also learned specific areas where they outranked their competitors and/or where they can hone their marketing messages to gain more market share. For example, upon launching the new Palazzo property (next door to their Venetian property) their dining advocacy scores increased 24%. This was largely due to the broad range of options on the adjacent properties and resulted in outpacing their top competitors. Meanwhile several of their competitors received negative comments about high-priced restaurants with low quality food.

Las Vegas Sands Corporation can confidently promote a message about the Venetian and Palazzo properties offering the broadest range of top quality restaurants — and deliver on that expectation. Additionally, since dining was the #3 feature driving guest advocacy for all of the properties combined, at 14% of all opinions, they learned that this is a good feature to invest in promoting.

This new form of social media research methodology not only provides quantitative results for brands and product models (or properties), but it also provides quantitative insight at the product attribute and feature level along with access to the real verbatim opinions that color the data like these complaints, for example, for the Mirage and Paris properties:
• “It was one of the most expensive Chinese meals I’ve ever had (about $120.00) for two adults and two kids, but it was adequate”.
• “Had a miserable expensive pizza: soggy and greasy.”

The baseline study analyzed over 28,000 opinions for 10 competing properties, and the followup benchmark study included another additional 19,000 opinions. How many other research methodologies can deliver this census based approach and this level of competitive insight?  I believe it is a incredibly efficient method of research.