The explosion of social media data is having a transformative effect on market intelligence and research.

An Economist article from late last year states the context well: “Big companies now obsessively monitor social media to find out what their customers really think about them…As communication grows ever easier, the important thing is detecting whispers of useful information in a howling hurricane of noise…the new world will be expensive.  Companies will have to invest in ever more channels to capture the same number of ears.  For listeners, it will be baffling.  Everyone will need better filters—editors, analysts, middle managers and so on—to help them extract meaning from the blizzard of buzz.”

Being able to extract this meaning is a challenge – it’s not easy to do – but it represents a significant opportunity for market researchers to gain competitive advantage.  In a series of posts, we’ll be addressing some of the questions that a researcher has to answer before they can drive that advantage for their employer.  These questions include:

1) How do I make sure my research is based on relevant data?

2) Which social data are most useful to a researcher?

3) Is ‘automated’ analysis – for example, sentiment analysis software – usable by market research professionals?

Before we address the first question, let’s take a moment to consider the context.  The fundamental challenge to anyone trying to make sense of how social media fits into a researcher’s toolkit has to understand is that social media ‘conversation’ essentially has two different types of use.  First, it can be used for ‘monitoring’ purposes (e.g., crisis response or customer service); second, it can be used for ‘insights’ purposes (e.g., analyzing online conversations that might inform product development, or as a way to measure brand perception).  These types of purposes have different requirements in terms of data, but the way in which social media monitoring tools are being used today often obscures this distinction.  Buyers end up looking for a silver bullet to hit both targets.  The difficulty with that approach is that when you’re using a monitoring tool for customer service, for example, you need to see every message that might be relevant; you have to err on the side of making sure you don’t miss any content, so you undoubtedly set your keywords or searches up with that in mind.  On the other hand, someone trying to analyze social media conversation to understand whether their company’s key brand values are resonating online, for example, needs to make sure that they’re only analyzing relevant content; irrelevant content here only serves to muddy the analytical waters.

The competition between these types of purpose – an analog of the trade-off between recall and precision in text analytics, in fact – should be clearly understood by any researcher looking to use social media for market research purposes.

So how do we identify which data are relevant and represent the opinions that we want to analyze?  Last year, my colleague Chris Boudreaux co-authored a research paper looking at the correlation between online sentiment and an offline brand-tracking.  The research showed that there is a correlation between the two measures, but only after controlling for one or a range of factors.  One of the controls identified as being key to any correlation was making sure that the person commenting online had experience with the brand in question.

This makes total sense: make sure you’re listening to the right people.  Analyzing social media data without controlling for whose comments you’re looking at would be like sending out an online survey to everyone in your sample database; you just wouldn’t do it.  Do you want to listen to what your customers thinks about your latest product?  If so, don’t listen to your own employees, and don’t listen to your competitors.  The opinions of both of these groups have their place, but not to answer that specific question.  So how do you configure your social media research with that in mind?

First, at the author level, you can choose to only include messages in your analysis that are posted by the people whose opinions you’re interested in.  The way you define groups of people here may in fact map to your existing customer segmentation taxonomy.

Second, you could choose to ‘listen’ only in those venues where the audience whose opinion you’re interested in is likely to be engaging.

Third, you can make sure that you’re only including in your analysis messages where your product is being talked about in a relevant context.

Using these three approaches will help you make sure you’re analyzing data from the relevant people, discussing the relevant issues – giving you a solid foundation from which to start your analysis.

For information on how Converseon can help you get to the right data, contact jsnyder@converseon.com.

Credit: Internet Evolution

Here are three ways to create differentiated and compelling content, that you won’t find mentioned in blogs about content marketing:

1. Web Apps
Build a unique and compelling web application to drive ongoing, evergreen traffic to your property. Common examples include a dealer locator on the web site of a tire manufacturer, but that is somewhat obvious. If you really want to differentiate your brand, create an application that no competing brands offer, like, oh… I don’t know… maybe an online database of social media policies — a simple example, but that page has generated thousands of visits per day for three years.

What kind of web app could you create to give your customers something of value, establish a relationship based on trust, and keep them coming back? Bonus points if you build it atop an asset that your competitors do not possess.

2. Measurement
Do you know the attributes of your content that generate the greatest engagement or sharing? Most brands don’t. Most brands outside of the media industry don’t think about it at the level required to optimize content development at large scale.

3. Intent Research
When your marketers, or SMEs, or agency staff are writing content for the brand, they should have ready access to the latest search trends and conversation insights to understand the language that online audiences are using at that time.

Most use cases do not require the information in real-time, up-to-the-moment, but many campaigns would benefit from daily updates, if not weekly or monthly. When was the last time you wrote a press release whose keywords were informed by SEO and SEM goals, and the latest search volumes on those keywords? These tools and approaches iare growing more widely understood and blogged about, but almost no large brand is executing it with consistency.

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Chris Boudreaux leads Converseon’s Strategy and Measurement practice, which designs and delivers social and digital measurement and content optimization services to global brands. Follow Chris on Twitter, or email Chris to continue the conversation.

2011 was a whirlwind here at Converseon. After more than doubling in size in 2010, our mission in 2011 was to focus on stabilizing and evolving new “socially-intelligent” solutions — products and services — that will come to market in 2012. In fact, we nearly doubled our technology spend in 2011 purposefully to build the robust infrastructure and technologies needed to help brands leverage social media to meet business objectives. Some of these are now in beta and others will be coming soon. On the services side, we doubled down on our talent and solutions — and expanded our offerings especially in the area of creative and social CRM consulting. In short, it was a time of great metamorphosis as we again challenged ourselves to evolve ahead of the marketplace and meet the needs of market as we move into 2012.

In fact, while we celebrated our ten year anniversary — and was cited by Shel Israel as the industry’s first pure play social media agency — we believe 2011 represented some of our most significant evolution internally. We did so because we see 2012 as the year of “social rigor” and have evolved our technologies and solutions in a manner to uniquely meet these market demands.

What is “social rigor?” In our experience, 2007-2011 represented a time significant experimentation at brands in social. The approach was often to seed the garden, see what took root, and let it grow, pilot, evolve and do so again. The result for some is messy gardens and far too unclear, in many cases, impact on business outcomes. This isn’t surprising, as it mirrors very much the earlier days of digital. But those days are coming to an end, quickly.

As we move into 2012 though, we predict brands will adopt an approach that applies social with much more rigor. This approach will be characterized by:

Santa’s bag is going to be full of iPhones and iPads this year, judging from the products people mention in tweets with the #DearSanta hashtag. Converseon pulled all of the tweets between 12/5 and 12/12 for a total of 10,680 messages. In these tweets, 25% mention a specific product by name in a positive manner for a total of 2,670 free consumer endorsements. Electronics was the most frequently mentioned product category, and Apple was the most frequently mentioned brand.

• Microsoft Xbox was the most frequently mentioned video game system, and Microsoft the second most frequently mentioned brand.
• Samsung’s Galaxy tab also had a strong showing, appearing in around 4% of #DearSanta tweets — this is the same number of tweets that mention the iPad.
• 40% of #DearSanta product tweets mentioned electronics products.
• Around 20% of #DearSanta product tweets mentioned apparel products.
• Shoes were the most frequently mentioned product type in the apparel category.

n = 800, confidence level of 95% and a confidence interval of +/- 4%

Customers are normally the best sources of product and marketing ideas*, and social media are perfect for harvesting those ideas, every day. In fact, one Converseon client recently used our social media research to dramatically improve campaign performance, simply by understanding how customers wished they could use the product.

Simply stated, they recognized a trend in real — and imagined — product usage, then tailored their marketing messages to fit customer beliefs and needs, in real time.

For example, see the following chart, which summarizes disguised conversation data pertaining to a technology server product shortly after its release to market:

At product launch, the server’s manufacturer promoted the server’s superior performance in business applications, such as retail analytics and cloud computing. During the campaign, our research found that customers were attracted to the server’s role in cloud computing, but expressed less interest in retail analytical applications. Instead, many conversations focused on the server’s reliability in data protection.

Recognizing the conversational trend, the brand adapted its marketing messages with significant improvement in the performance of the campaign.

In addition to improving campaign performance, social media research has helped brands understand how product applications evolve over time, as input into product development.

Learn how to use social media research to improve campaign performance or generate new insights for product development.

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* “Re-invention”, as coined by social scientist Everett M. Rogers in his book, Diffusion of Innovations.

People are wrong in their criticisms of the Apple social media policy that was allegedly leaked recently, and here is why:

A company’s social media policy should support the unique qualities that make the company successful. In fact, the elements of a successful social media policy must exist in concert with the unique culture and business context of any organization.

In Apple’s case, secrecy has been a critical key to success. While many social media pundits claim that Apple should be more open, very few of those people are running billion-dollar corporations, and the notion that all companies should apply the same level of “open-ness” is, at best, over-simplified.

Comparisons to other technology companies abound, but that just makes no sense. Those companies and Apple take completely different approaches to differentiation, which has led them to create very different cultures. They also rely on different business processes to create growth and value. Many are well-run and highly successful, but for very different reasons.

And those differences are the keys to understanding why they use different social media policies.

The chart above shows the business factors that companies should consider when developing an effective social media policy (which I published in The Social Media Management Handbook earlier this year).

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Chris Boudreaux leads the Strategy and Measurement practice at Converseon and created SocialMediaGovernance.com to help companies govern social media, including the largest online database of social media policies. You can Contact Chris on his web site, or by email: cboudreaux [at] converseon-dot-com.

On November 9, Converseon’s lead scientist keynoted the Sentiment Analysis Symposium in San Francisco. It was my first Symposium event organized by Seth Grimes, and I was impressed with the quality of speakers and content. It was one of those that effectively bridged academia with practical business applications.

While we talk a lot about how to make social media drive business results in our communications and white papers, we have not often dwelled deeply into the science behind our social intelligence technology, Conversation Miner. Behind the scenes we have had a team of PHDs, including Dr Resnik, when he’s not attending to his professorial duties at the University of Maryland working hard on these problems.

As a wide range of academics, researchers and forward leaning brands discussed at the conference, the challenge of how to understand this vast unstructured social conversation to finding meaning and insight is one of the great technical challenges of our time. It is also perhaps one of the most profound. The implications of not just capturing — but understanding — this conversation for brand management, advertising, customer service, R&D and more is only now starting to become realized.

In a webcast yesterday with Bulldog Reporter’s PR University, my fellow presenters and I discussed interesting ways that brands should consider using Google+ today. It was an engaging and educational session with social media practitioners of different backgrounds giving their two cents on Google+, including the following five tactics I suggest brands consider today:

1. Reach new audiences
2. Create content experiences
3. Position yourself as thought leader or trusted advisor
4. Improve your SEO
5. Listen

1. Reach New Audiences

Users don’t need to bring their friends to enjoy Google+. On Google+, users can seek out topics and then discover interesting conversations among strangers with similar interests. In that respect, it is more like Twitter than Facebook: Facebook has no value without your friends. Therefore, Google+ should be a good place to find and engage new audiences who may not know about you today.

2. Create Content Experiences

People who use Google+ are not looking for an alternative to Facebook. They want a better experience on Google properties. Create more content that engages and facilitate conversations around your content.