Posts Tagged ‘Listening’

Unleashing Consumer Insights with Social Media

Tuesday, February 8th, 2011

Monitoring and Listening are quickly becoming commodity type words, and that’s wrong.  In my travels and discussions with all types of Fortune 100 marketers, many are using the terms to explain what they are doing in social media, yet most cannot give me any meaningful value from the actions.   The same goes with the resulting data.  These same marketers will show me the pretty reports from their very sophisticated systems, yet hardly any are doing anything with the data to evolve actionable insights.  It’s not the systems fault, or the marketers, really.  We are at a point where an evolution is needed in how we think about this stage of the social media process.

When you listen generically, you will hear a lot of noise.  If you know where to point your microphone though, you could here prospects who are asking for your product recommendations, customers who are seeking answers about their latest purchase or better understand the latest product buzz from your competitors.  One might also be able to identify people who are passionate about your product/company, people with ideas that you could incorporate, employees and their opinion on their work environments.

To better account for this, I prefer to move away from talking about the tactical actions of listening/monitoring and focus more on the outcomes: Learning.  Let’s set up a learning post or focus your reports on what you have learned today.  Putting on that lens, clients start to think very different in how they act and how they report on those actions that ultimately leads to a new found value in running these listening / learning posts.

Now that you are learning new things every day, how do you unleash the data being collected into actionable insights.  The first step was discussed above.  Listening for noise will get you just that.  Hearing what’s being said is a discipline that cannot be overlooked.  Next, knowing what to do with the information is critical.  Do you send ideas to the product team, issues to service and branding to marketing?  Or are you relying on one person to manage every conversation just because it’s digital?  This would be the equivalent to having customer service, returns, cashiers and product specialists all be the check out person in your retail store.

Learning about your customers is critical to being able to engage with them.  Who better to discuss this than the President & CEO of Communispace, Diane Hessan.  Communispace has been helping their clients understand the intricacies of doing business in a digital and social world for many years now.  The have helped dozens of large companies innovate in new and exciting ways and they understand how to create value throughout their digital and traditional landscapes.  With this experience, Diane will lead this week’s #socialmedia discussion.  The topic and questions are listed below:

Unleashing Consumer Insights with Social Media

  1.  There is so much information on the web today.  What’s the difference between info & insight?
  2. What are the best strategies for engaging consumers & getting them to open up their lives online?
  3. Other than the standard Dell/Starbucks stories, what companies do you think are great at listening online?

Please join us in this online chat on Tuesday, February 8 at noon ET.  Follow #sm97 from your favorite Twitter client or simply go to our LIVE page at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.  The format will stay the same with the first question starting at noon and a new question coming every 20 minutes at 12:20 and 12:40.

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Posted in Innovation, Listening | 1 Comment »

Sentiment Analysis: Opinions Matter, If Only You Knew Which Ones

Friday, February 12th, 2010

active_listeningListening is the first step in social media (everyone says so).  Not onlydo you have to listen, you have to listen for 6 months or more before you are allowed to do anything.  Just ask the experts!

Frankly, I think everyone says that just to buy a little time before they have to really figure out what to do with social.  At any rate, most of the people who are told to listen have no idea what to listen for or who to listen to.  I’m not going to get into the depths of all things social media monitoring because that would take all day.  So let’s focus a minute.  

  1. You want to listen for mentions of your company, brand and top executives
  2. You quickly determine there is no way to manually search every blog post, tweet or comment on the web so you turn to automation
  3. Yeah, now you’re tracking buzzzz, but what does it all mean?
  4. So you start running reports and determine they are inadequate at best.
  5. Now you’re back to listening again but still not sure what you’re listening for.

 There is a word in the industry called “Sentiment” that is used when trying to determine a person’s attitude.  Online it’s a digital attitude and you only have text to go by.  No voice inflection.  No hand gestures or facial signals.  Just a bunch of words (or “noise” as they call it in the bubble) with little signal.  The challenge, after aggregating all of the buzz or mentions of everything you are tracking, is to make sense of it all and to make it actionable back inside your company.  So the sticking point here is whether or not you can use automated analysis to provide sentiment or if it has to be all human interface.  For any local or small business, human processing of sentiment might be reasonable.  However with any size at all, you would need a small army to determine if people liked your new product or enjoy working with your company…or would you?

If you ask 10 people how to measure sentiment, you will most certainly get 12 answers (yes 12).  The popular themes of managing sentiment revolve around polarity and intensity.  Polarity meaning either good/bad, positive/negative, like/dislike, etc and intensity meaning the volume or amount of mentions.  These are not wrong by any means, but I use a little different formula and you might say it’s probably for different purpose.  I like to consider the following:

  • Mentions – which is broken into volume, intensity and opinion (polarity)
  • Influence – of the person it comes from. How many followers, how often they interact (like a TwitterGrader)
  • Severity – of the content itself. “X product just saved my life or killed my brother” would be Sev1, where “Boss caught me goofing off and fired me, X company sucks” would be low severity.  Further defined by a direct vs indirect mention and context of the content.

OK, try managing that formula through reports.  No way, Jose!  And, by the way, I usually change what I am monitoring (at least the focus) to match what I am working on.  There are companies who are working on ways to automate forms of sentiment through natural language processing and machine based or community based learning.  They have their claims on successes and what they have may work for a lot of people in a lot of situations.  It has to be an individual call.  So how do you know what’s right for you?  That’s where this week’s moderator Katie Paine comes in.  Katie, affectionately known as the “queen of measurement”, spends most of her day answering these questions for her customers.  She will host our next chat with the following topic and questions:

TOPIC: Sentiment Analysis: Opinions Matter, If Only You Knew Which Ones

Q1:  How do you define positive sentiment?
Q2:  How does that impact your organizational goals?
Q3:  How do you know that what you are measuring matters?

Please join us Tuesday 02/16 at noon est and become part of the conversation.  Learn insights and have an opportunity to capture Katie’s attention for a solid hour.  Follow along using #sm47 or simply go to our LIVE page.

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Posted in Listening, Measurement | 1 Comment »

How Social Media can Influence a Next Generation of Listening – Consumer Insights 2.0

Monday, September 21st, 2009

InsightsThe explosion of consumer networks like Facebook, MySpace & LinkedIn and digital platforms such as Twitter, blogs, forums and other types of social media continue their expansion across the internet at breakneck pace.  With the proliferation of these networks, consumers have almost unlimited means by which to share their brand experiences and opinions.  These opinions, whether good or bad, are readily available to other consumers for a long time…at least.  As companies of all sizes are begining to understand that many times, these opinions have more influence in the potential purchase decisions of other consumers than almost any other form of marketing or communications.   In this case, “listening” to consumers for sentiment is a purely reactive effort.

So if listening as we understand it is a reactive measure, how can we “listen” more effectively and for better results?  How can we better predict a consumer’s actions based things like the economy (pricing) and factors like age, gender, geography and more interestingly, social graphs?  How about emerging market trends, Brand and sector vulnerabilities?  The vast trove of data across the web can present more than typical quantitative and qualitative based research.  The information, if used in creative ways, can lead companies in understanding how cultures, personal networks and digital platforms can influence propensity to purchase, length of product trials needed, effect of negative influence, etc.  In the words of a leading consumer insights company, ScenarioDNA, it’s “looking for patterns and making connections that become the building blocks for better ideas”

Handling the topic this week is the leading digital consultant Ken Burbary from Ernst & Young, #3 on the Global list of accounting firms.  Ken has led digital practice teams from both the agency side and client side and is a thought leader on many digital practices being used today.  Ken will lead the the discussion in discovering new ways to listen, how to better influence your company with the results and how to coral the resources needed to be effective.  The questions this week are as follows:

Topic – How Social Media can Influence a Next Generation of Listening – Consumer Insights 2.0

Q1:  Beyond Brand Mentions – (good/bad) what should you be listening for?

Q2: What resources and people are needed?

Q3:  How can consumer insights drive actionable results throughout the organization?

Q4:   Ways to fund your SMM program?

Please tune in Tuesday 9/22 at noon EST, follow #socialmedia and share your point-of-view.

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Develop a Corporate Listening Grid

Sunday, May 17th, 2009

improve-listening-skillsIf you have followed us at all you will know that we are trying to get beyond the traditional social media speak of “The keys to social media, listen and be transparent….blah, blah, blah”.  So when talking to the fine folks at Radian6 you can imagine the excitement when we actually got energized talking about LISTENING.  Listening is important, yet even the most seasoned gurus don’t have a good grasp on how to help companies modify their beings to incorporate an interactive culture beyond the one twenty-something who’s willing to give it a shot.  So let’s set a baseline for discussion:

Companies have spent the last few decades building a corporate veil over their brands and relying on having the few “experts” create the features and develop a voice for the Brand.  That focus on experts lead to knowledge and skills being huddled into only a couple, select employees.  That egalitarian style that was developed throughout the 80s and 90s is now counter-intuitive to the social movement.  This is why companies are having so many cultural problems in allowing more access to people throughout companies with insight that is traditionally suppressed.

On Tuesday, we’ll focus the discussion around developing a fundamental plan for companies to create and instill a Listening Grid of sorts.  A way for executives to plan their way through opening tracks of interactive dialogue with customers, partners, channels, or even other employees.  The three questions will be:

  • 1. What is the cultural shift that needs to happen today in business to accommodate social media?
  • 2. We get listening for the detractors. What are other ways that companies need to listen?
  • 3. Let’s develop a list or chronology of how to create a listening grid within a company.

We are very excited to welcome David Alston as our moderator this week.  David is the head of marketing at Radian 6 and will be sure to add a ton of value as his expertise is an inch wide and a mile deep in this particular topic.  Please join us this Tuesday at Noon EST and be sure to include #socialmedia in your tweets to have your input captured here at www.hashtagsocialmedia.com/live.

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Posted in corporate, Listening, Measurement | 3 Comments »