Posts Tagged ‘online market 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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Last week’s CES brought us a flurry of exciting announcements, but the most exciting one (I think) happened the day before CES got underway. Last Tuesday (which also happened to be my first day with Biz360), marked the launch of Nexus One, the first official Google phone built on the Android platform. A topic that’s this widely discussed in the blogosphere and the Twittersphere is just music to the ears of someone like me. Imagine all the tracking, monitoring and measurement that can be done! Well, now you can stop imagining and just read this post.

I wanted to figure out not only what’s going on in the Nexus One land, but also how this news is affecting public opinion of its closest competitors. Is it really an iPhone killer? Where does the Motorola Droid fit in? For the purposes of this post, I tracked mentions of three touch-screen smartphones: Nexus One, iPhone and Motorola Droid, across 4 types of media: blogs, microblogs, online news and forums / discussion boards. Unless otherwise noted, data is based on a combined measurement of these media.

During and after its launch, Nexus One experienced a tremendous rise in coverage (coverage is an estimated count of online mentions across the 4 types of media at hand). Even so, at 102.4K mentions, it pales in comparison to the 866k iPhone mentions (that’s 8.5x the coverage of Nexus One!). Clearly, the iPhone is still top of mind across social media platforms and is the reigning king of the touchscreen smartphone sector. Based on mindshare, Nexus One is not the famed iPhone killer (at least not just yet). *Note: you can see a larger version of each chart by clicking on it.

Here it makes sense to make a distinction about coverage vs. impact and reach, the terms I will be using liberally in these trend reports. As I mentioned above, coverage is basically the number of mentions via the social web (by keyword, collection of keywords, however you define your “topic”). Each of these media mentions has reach and impact. Reach signifies how many visitors / subscribers that site has. Impact is a more finely tuned metric: with impact we actually estimate how many people read a particular article, and thus how much influence a particular post carries. For example, Mashable may have x number of unique visitors and subscribers, but does everyone read every post? Of course not! We estimate out how many people actually read a particular post; hence the two separate metrics of reach and impact. What does this mean in the context of our smartphone study?

If you look at impact, iPhone’s impact is only 4.9 times that of the Nexus One (see below left), as compared to 8.5 times Nexus One’s coverage. Also, Nexus One receives more comments per mention than the iPhone (see below right). What does this mean? This is how I think about it: even though there are a lot more instances online in which the iPhone is mentioned, readers are more likely to read and interact with articles written about Nexus One.

Now let’s take a closer look at where all of this action is happening; just as importantly, how people feel about these products, and how that feeling may have changed over time: pre and post release of the Nexus One.

Where is the chatter?

Nexus One was covered by all 4 types of media, but the majority of the activity happened in blogs (35% of all mentions), and in microblogs (29%) (see below). iPhone is covered pretty evenly by discussion boards (29%), microblogs (28%) and blogs (27%). Droid (not shown here) also was mostly discussed in forums, microblogs and blogs.

Coverage across the different sources is pretty clear cut, but what impact do they each have? Here’s an interesting finding: if we look at impact, microblogs are pretty much absent. If you look at the chart below, the majority (63%) of Nexus One conversations is happening in blogs. Where did Twitter go? Microblogs were, after all, the #2 source by coverage. We use a different calculation to calculate impact of tweets (based on retweets and other metrics), but it’s clear that the impact of each tweet is much less than that of a blog or news article (although there are roughly as many tweets as blog mentions).

What’s the implication for a community manager, social media marketer, or blogger? If you are trying to engage with your community in a place that’s relevant to them, you need to know where your community is. This is how you decide where you should focus your time and effort. Clearly, for the smartphone sector, blogs, microblogs and discussion forums are best. But where do you start? Well, a deeper dive needs to be conducted to figure out what the top sources are, and who the top authors are (bloggers, online journalists, thought leaders on Twitter), and engaging with them.

Survey says… People like it!

So now we know there’s a lot of chatter, and we know where it’s happening. But what exactly are people saying about this new product? According to Biz360’s sentiment analysis, the vast majority of the Nexus One sentiment was positive (39.3%) or neutral (37.9%) (see below left). However, if you look at sentiment of impact, you will see that it was overwhelmingly positive at 66.4% (see below right). What does this mean? Simply that the articles that garnered the most readership happened to be positive; looks like the respected tech reporters and bloggers felt positively about Nexus One.

By comparison, Droid garnered the most positive sentiment at 67% (below left), and iPhone sentiment was the lowest of the three.

Let’s take a look at how Nexus One sentiment changed over time (see below left). Before launch (which is represented by the tallest spike of coverage, as expected), feelings were mostly neutral, but on 1/5/10 positive sentiment soared. Incidentally, in a sort of a halo effect, the Motorola Droid also got a lift of positive sentiment on 1/5/10 (see below right). This makes sense, as a major announcement like this gives rise to many blogposts and studies comparing competitive units. Seems that Motorola Droid fared pretty well.

On 1/5/10, articles with Nexus One positive sentiment were consumed by 170 million readers, which is simply staggering.

Topic discovery

The Biz360 Community Insights tool can also be used to discover relevant trends unfolding around your topic, presented in a highly visual tag cloud. If we include all media, we get a lot of Twitter vernacular like “RT, follow and RT, RT to win”. So this is what you get when you consider all media without microblogs:” Google”, “video,” “Endgaget”, “Google faces deluge of Nexus One complaints”, “Google unveils retail ambitions”, “Nexus One review”, “Nexus Motorola”, “Nexus iPhone” (below right). Hmm… so even if everything seems to be positively-toned on the surface, Google’s inability to service its device is definitely a trending topic. If I was Google, I’d take a deeper dive by building a topic about “Nexus One complaints”, and create a plan of action.

Note: Coverage metrics may differ depending on days and search terms you are including. The Biz360 monitoring platform, just like the rest of best-in-breed platforms, is a living organism, which picks up new sources as they become available, for better relevance. New sites get added and indexed all the time, that’s the nature of the ever-changing social media landscape.

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.

Recently I attended a roundtable event lead by Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester where 28 industry leading companies discussed our predictions on the future of social media. It was an incredible day where leaders from companies like Wells Fargo, Cisco, IBM, Google, Nokia, SAP, Oracle, Intel, and others all shared our best ideas about how social media will change our personal and professional future. We came up with several insightful predictions that will be published in an upcoming Forrester Report.

 The event spurred my thinking around a couple of ideas how social media can help companies facing shrinking budgets during this tough economic climate.  

 1)       Eliminate Guesswork –

a.       Then…..It used to be that one of the best ways to find out what consumers thought was to pay small groups of random citizens to sit down in a non-descript room with 1 way mirror windows to answer prescribed questions about their shopping habits (or whatever issue we wanted to probe them about). We would conduct hundreds of these focus groups in small and large cities across the country trying to be sure our methodology was defensible – since we were expecting that these few hundred specimens would absolutely represent the sentiment of the 300 million people in our country. We would supplement this with random calling households by telephone precisely at dinner time to ask them a series of questions with very specific words designed to predict what the person would do in the real world.

b.      Now….On the internet today there are tens of millions of active communities talking about every topic you can possibly imagine. People are telling you what they think without the interpretation bias of a survey question. Technological advances in text mining and Natural Language Processing allow us to understand what millions of consumers think about virtually any topic you can imagine. The most innovative companies have already figured out ways to bring social communities into their board rooms to help make critical business decisions. More and more companies see social media as a way to mitigate the budget cuts that are forcing them to cut spending on traditional market research studies. You no longer need to guess what people think about a specific topic – millions are already talking about it every day in online discussions.  Reduce your traditional market research budgets and supplement those projects with technology based social media research.

2)       Don’t be afraid to jump in –

a.       Then…there were so many miss-steps early in social media that most companies were happy to stay on the side lines to avoid making a mistake that could impact the brand and get someone fired. We can all think of our favorite social media gaff whether it was a PR agency pretending to be enthusiastic employees of a major retailer or images of laptop batteries catching on fire spreading across the global web, or even the Turner Network devices that were scattered around several cities to hopefully generate online discussion of a new TV show that instead lead to a bomb squad scare.

b.      Now… the most innovative companies have found ways to join the discussion in a transparent way and that doing so can be really good for business by changing the dynamics of the discussion, solving problems faster than traditional means and generating scores of great ideas. Rather than making customers go through the incredibly annoying voice activated telephone directories trying to find any live person in customer service, the best companies are deploying customer service reps directly into online community discussions to see if they can help resolve common problems. These companies are finding that you can answer common problems that hundreds or thousands of customers might be having with their products by simply joining the conversation. The result is a lower cost of service as well as an increase in client retention. These companies are also benefitting from an increase in advocacy as most social media citizens applaud the more open and honest discussion with companies that was all but eliminated with the advent of scripted call centers or automated telephone systems. You can do this a number of ways but the most common include creating an area on your corporate web site where customers can chat with your customer service reps (swimming in the shallow water) or you can empower your best customer advocates to engage discussions in the online communities that are having the biggest impact on your brand or your products (diving in the deep end). We always recommend full disclosure of who they are and what they are looking to do – solve customers’ problems.

 There are many ways you can use social media as marketing and operations budgets are being scrutinized.  These are a sample of some of the ways our clients are using social media to swim upstream during this challenging economy.