Posts Tagged ‘online consumer research’

This post was inspired by Tuesday’s #SM48 Twitter chat led by Ken Burbary. This particular chat, hosted by Hashtag Media is a weekly gathering of likeminded social media practitioners who discuss a particular topic within social media. This week’s topic was “segmentation”, which fascinated me right off the bat, due to my background in both: traditional and “new media” marketing. During the Twitter chat, we discussed the differences between traditional segmentation vs. segmentation in and via social media channels. The discussion really made me think, as it put an interesting spin on the traditional notion of segmentation.

Traditional marketers have always segmented their users based on a set of common characteristics, thereby creating a customer profile with distinct needs, wants, beliefs, demographics, psychographics, etc. Each segment was assigned its own marketing strategy, with “the 4Ps of marketing” as the underlying framework. Each segment got its own promotional message, through the appropriate media channel (Promotion), sold via an appropriate channel (Place), and sometimes got its own version of the product or product extension (Product) at its own Price. Collecting data to power these insights via traditional market research methods was expensive, and could only be done every so often. Yet, segmentation was the best attempt that we as marketers had to give our customers what they needed, when and where they needed it.

Enter social media. Brands no longer need to ask us what we need, we tell what we want to whoever is listening, and it is my hope that most brands are starting to understand how important listening and engaging is (if you don’t, contact me straight away!). But instead of 10 major customer segments, a brand now has 10 million individuals who have disparate and pronounced needs. How do we segment now? Should we segment down to the individual, or a slightly larger cluster? I believe there’s room for both. We should be listening and analyzing larger trends in our target market’s social media conversations. This will fuel our pricing, product and corporate messaging decisions. Additionally, due to the one-on-one nature of social media, we have the ability to tell our story to the individual in a conversational format. This becomes less about marketing and more about a conversation. Imagine if your friend had a problem, and you offered him / her a solution. Well, this is just like that.

This is what community managers like me do. We scour the social web to find mentions of our brands, our competitors’ brands and product categories. We listen for customers with good brand experiences, bad experiences, and non-customers (these non-customers can be new to the category or just new to your brand). We listen, digest and engage appropriately. What does it mean to engage appropriately? Simply having a conversation within the context of a person’s situation or need. For example, if I hear someone on Twitter saying “I am looking for a an affordable professional social media monitoring solution, competitor X is too expensive”, I can start a conversation with this person about how to get the most out of our tool with the least money. If someone says “I’m looking for a solution that measures sentiment in Portuguese”, I can talk to this person about our foreign language capability. I wouldn’t talk to either person about something that they have no interest in, such as workflow and alerts. Not to say that other features are unimportant; however, when you have 140 characters to make a first impression, it has to be relevant to that person’s expressed needs. Don’t “show up and throw up” and start reciting your company’s top 5 differentiators. Mold your message to the situation and the person. That’s segmentation at its best.

How do you segment your customers? Do you use social media for one-on-one engagement? Do you also let larger trends drive your larger product and strategy decisions? The comments are yours!

Photo source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/2671532954/

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Since we have access to so much data via our Community Insights platform, I thought we would do something a little fun. Most of the time, we use our monitoring platform and smart sentiment engine to help customers engage and win in the buzzing, and often disorienting, social media space. But sometimes, we use our data and sentiment measurement to make predictions on what may happen next. For example, we used our sentiment measurement to predict the winner of American Idol last year.

Today, I want to ruminate and speculate about the Apple Tablet. It grabbed my attention, because the following FoxNews article is now in day 2 of being at the top of Techmeme. A read of the aforementioned article confirms the several-month-long chatter around the Apple Tablet rumors, and also tells us that Apple is in talks with two of the largest carriers, AT&T and Verizon. A data junkie wants to know if we can we use social media to: 1) understand who is talking about the Apple Tablet and where, 2) how people feel about it, and 3) how they feel about the Apple’s partnership with the two carriers?

Here’s what the data tells us:

Most of the Apple Tablet chatter is occurring in microblogs and blogs:

Sentiment towards the Apple Tablet has evolved over the past couple of weeks. We are ending the 2-week cycle with a more positive disposition than we started with (see below). Perhaps because before it was considered a bunch of unfounded rumors, but now it’s actually starting to look real?  A deep dive into each day of sentiment can help uncover who is driving the conversation. This is beyond the scope of this post, but useful information for an Apple analyst or the marketing and social media team at Apple.

Is there any difference in how the different media sources feel about the Apple Tablet? I am excluding Twitter from this discussion, because tweets are notoriously difficult to calculate sentiment due to Twitter’s own syntax and character economy, which makes grammar and spelling fall by the wayside. Other than that, seems that blogs (see below) are more excited about the Tablet than discussion forums. Among some of the largest (in terms of reach and impact) blog sources contributing positive sentiment on 1.21 were Yahoo! Tech Blogs, CNET, iClarified, MacUser, and many many others.

Interesting to note that interest in the subject peaked on forums on the 13th and the 21st of this month (see below), but seemed to languish in between. A deeper dive into some of the negative forums with the widest reach reveals: PC World Forums like this one, and this one and AfterDawn forums, MacWorld forums, Apple Insider and many others. The Apple Tablet community manager has her job cut out for her!

One of the coolest things that Community Insights can do is generate a tag cloud around your topic of choice. Let’s see what the bloggers are saying about the Tablet:

Most of the phrases are around rumors and confirmations of announcement, camera on the iPhone (it won’t have a camera and it will – hmmm so which one is it?), NY Times Paywall, Webcam, 3G, Apple Tablet coming to Verizon (is it really? I guess we’ll have to wait and see on that one), and other “truemors.”

Speaking of Verizon… Which carrier will Apple choose? Apple Tablet certainly seems to have a higher share of voice than AT&T:

And a closer look at the Verizon vs. AT&T tag cloud clearly shows that “AT&T is an Apple Tablet dealbraker” (wow, strong statement), and contradictory statements like “AT&T to get apple tablet” and “Apple is headed to Verizon”.

The Verizon & Apple Tablet tag cloud includes many of the same phrases, but the most frequently occurring phrase seems to be a more definitive one “Apple will be sold” (through Verizon), while many other occurrences include both “AT&T” and “Verizon” in the same phrase.

Although sentiment for both carriers seems to be about even, with the slight leaning towards Verizon, the fact that Apple is talking to both carriers makes me think that they will be able to offer it through both AT&T and Verizon. I certainly  hope so, because after the release of  the carrier-agnostic (sort of) Nexus One, all smartphone manufacturers should start to become available through many carriers. I guess only time will tell, on January 27th.

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.