By Tom “The Burf” Burford
What are we talking about?
In marketing and economic terms Sentiment is a measure of consumer confidence, a form of Mass Opinion Measurement. Traditionally it was measured through telephone interviews on a regular (i.e. monthly) basis giving a ‘near-time’ measure of consumer attitude towards something broad, like the economy.
The inputs were the answers to a series of questions asked to a large number of participants over the phone, such as:
- Are you happy?
- Perception of the economy over the long term / short term?
- Perception of you current financial situation?
- Perception of your current job security?
Get the metric right (A large undertaking in itself) and the outcome is near-time sentiment.
In just the last twelve or so months of radical change in the social media landscape, a new way of measuring sentiment has been born. We can tap into the openness and the API’s of twitter (that’s the major change in the last twelve months), blog’s, user generated comments, photo and video sharing sites etc.
Without asking people, we can see what people are saying and collect data on where they are geographically located, how old they are, what sex they are, what they do for a living and other relevant information.
We can take this information and filter down into granular detail, cross reference against current data on the local economic situation; unemployment, average wage, crime etc. We can take into account the local ecology too – like the weather, the landscape (i.e. hills and roads – relevance dependant on the product / service you are measuring)
We could also look at historic economic factors too, like quality of life index now and in the past, cost of living etc..
We can then build an algorithm to collate all this data and the outcome is real-time sentiment, sympathetic to external variables (i.e. the current season ifs its soup, the amount of hills if it’s a bike, the waves if its surfing etc.) If an FMCG can get this real time visibility on sentiment they can react quickly to leverage the good things and weed out the bad things.
Social media mentions are the tip of the iceberg, they are fun and can offer a high level overview (i.e. http://apps.facebook.com/usa_gnh/) but they don’t consider variables which could affect the social media mention and should therefore be considered part of the holistic process of measuring sentiment.
How do we make money from it:
- Review the customer’s social media efforts monthly / quarterly – deliver a structured report with a list of recommendations.
- Carry out recommendations – scoop the additional spend on interactive. Establish Deepend as social media partner.
How do we achieve all this?
Social media monitoring is still in its infancy. There is no absolute way to successfully measure the effectiveness of social media, however there are guidelines in social media strategy which have proven successful that we can follow, and there are a number of tools we can use to gather information which can be aggregated to give an indication of the success of a campaign.. This is what deepend can offer its customers.
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Managing expectations:
Buzz does not always directly convert to sales. There is a great deal of hype around social media and it would be wrong to let a customer think that a social media campaign will ‘just work’. Social media needs careful planning, defined strategy and ongoing nurture. Karen Ganschow (Telstra’s executive director of relationship marketing): “Social media is a courtship not a one night stand. It’s an ongoing relationship but in order to create relevant engagement.. you must have a plan for how you engage. These relationships should be nurtured and ongoing, they shouldn’t just be left at the end of the campaign.”
Be aware of the issues:
Reliability: social media monitoring is in its early days, we lack the tools to do a thorough job. A simple example: Group twitter comments together for an indication of how we collectively feel about something, if the weather is bad on day it might skew the sentiment that day and without considering this we lose accuracy. There are no tools which cross reference the weather against the sentiment, or the myriad other variables we may need to consider.
Social media guidelines:
‘Best-in-class’ companies are defining specific business metrics to quantify success:
- Defined metrics for measuring campaign and promotion success
- Defined metrics for measuring the value of market research
- Defined metrics for measuring new product development opportunities
Social Media success Checklist:
- An open, transparent communications approach
- Listening and learning before acting
- Internal resources dedicated to social media
- Active engagement in the conversations
- Clearly defined goals and expectations
- Risk mitigation plan
- Success analysis metrics
Monitoring tools:
http://www.sysomos.com/reports/topbrands/
nielsen buzzmetrics
.. I dont think any ‘out of the box’ solutions consider all the data I mentioned, but it’s the future, I promise.
