It is clear that social networks are becoming a channel of communication and relationship between people and between people and companies, generating millions of conversations between them. Today there are already countless cases of success in the use of social networks as a channel of communication and/or promotion of a brand or specific product. These are campaigns that generally seek to increase traffic to the website. http://bit.ly/eTEWjm , to the point of sale http://bit.ly/cDUvnk, or increase the number of brand followers, http://bit.ly/9Q4eiBBut the buzz about a brand can also be negative, if some population group or consumer segment considers that we are doing something wrong: producing, communicating, serving customers, managing human resources, etc. http://bit.ly/fOPACl .
In any case, whether positive or negative, can we consider that the information generated in all these interactions, whether completely spontaneous or somewhat forced by the marketing interests of companies, is a reliable basis for getting to know our clients or prospects better? To improve my products or the positioning of my brand?
In our opinion, there are different challenges that “analysts” must face if we want to work with reliable data: the representativeness of the conversations generated, having a clear measurement methodology and the incorporation of techniques already consolidated in the field of market research.
In our opinion, there are different challenges that “analysts” must face if we want to work with reliable data: the representativeness of the conversations generated, having a clear measurement methodology and the incorporation of techniques already consolidated in the field of market research.
We will start this post by talking about the representativeness of conversations.
Many social media buzz monitoring tools provide results about the number of comments about a brand in a given period, once we have entered the brand name (and variations of it) into the tool as keywords to follow. It is interesting to follow the buzz generated by my brand in a broad sense, but are these blogs, microblogs, networks, forums… the ones that my current or potential clients usually use to talk about me, my competition, my sector, my products…? Shouldn’t we take the opinions generated by these clients or influential users much more seriously than those that come from a universe that we don’t know who they represent? Defining who or what channels we are going to follow is therefore essential if the information obtained is to serve to gain further insight into our clients, our brand or our products and if we don’t want to succumb to unnecessary alarms or draw erroneous conclusions.
What can we do to identify who or what channels we are going to follow? We must distinguish between two identification groups:
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Social networks most closely related to my clients or my potential market: We recommend carrying out market research to identify the habits of our target audience: which social networks do they normally use? How often? How did they get to them? Are they our followers, or our competitors' followers? …
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Most influential users: There are various ways to measure influence on social networks, which we will discuss in a future post. Whatever the influence indicator used, we must identify the users who talk most about my brand, where do they post? How often? Do they talk positively or negatively? Are they my clients or potential clients? And most importantly, who is their audience? And focus our monitoring efforts on the most influential ones.
A sufficiently illustrative example of what we have just discussed reaches me via Twitter, just as I am writing this post. The Guardian has created an interactive map on its website of the tweets generated by its network of journalists, bloggers and experts on the current protests in Arab countries. http://bit.ly/e8rDLJ
It is clear that The Guardian's initiative aims to provide its readers with immediate information about what is happening, but also from reliable sources. If these tweets were analysed for the purpose of producing opinion articles for its readers, for example, they would have much more credibility than if The Guardian had selected a much wider universe of Twitter users.
Francesc Camp
