Social Media Listening | Koan Metrics

Nov 12

Social Media for the social sector

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Where does one start a ‘movement’ in the social sector…with a Blog or Community? Blogging appears more reasonable as a movement is always driven by cause and a cause by knowledge and a deep understanding of the situation/problem. This understanding is the key to developing sensitivity toward the topic. And given the fact that such movements are normally ‘driven’ by one or two individuals, presumably the place to start with, if one wants to bring in more people on the same page, is the Blog.

But there are two issues that appear inconsistent. One, a Blog is an exercise in ‘expression’ of individual opinion i.e a ‘One to Many’ exercise unlike a community group/portal with a ‘Many to Many’ approach i.e the sponsor takes the role of a back seat moderator, unlike blogging.

Two, comments/feedback are at best limited to the topic itself and response is dependent on what the Blogger writes. In other words, space for exponential growth of community gets limited as the space is available for topical debates only.

Perhaps a combination approach works best. That is, start with a Blog putting forth the vision of the movement and popularize it until a critical community mass is achieved. Call this the ‘seeding’ stage. Once the momentum is reached, it may be prudent to add a Community Portal where the community actions can be coordinated in a ‘Many to Many’ format.

For example, if one wants to create a diabetics support group and extend to other disease management, then one may want to seed the community with a Blog disseminating information about causes, treatments, support and resources and then move this ‘community seed’ from the Blog to a portal, at a later ‘point in time’. The ‘point in time’ could be when the sponsors feel that critical community mass has been achieved and the initial objective of promoting the vision and concept has been achieved.

Tagged with: blog • blogging • community • community portal • social cause • Social Media Blogs

May 27

Traditional Market Research vs. Social Media Listening

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Social media research is a totally different ball game than traditional market research especially quantitative research. It is based on listening not asking questions and the base data and the setting in which it is found is completely spontaneous. It provides real time intelligence all year round.

All quantitative research is essentially based on inductive generalizations about a population after a study of a small but statistically valid sample of the same. An inductive inference means that if you take a sample of a population and expose them to a stimulus; it is possible with a certain degree of certainty to assert that the entire population will react to the same stimulus in a similar manner. In other words, an inductive generalization proceeds from a premise about a sample to a conclusion about the population. For example,

If proportion ‘X’ of the sample has an attribute abc

Then:

The same proportion ‘X’ of the population will have attribute abc.

These kinds of inductive inferences cannot be based on social media research.

Also, Social media research cannot be used as reflective or representative of anything else e.g., offline word-of-mouth. It is online word-of-mouth and attempting to understand it is more akin to data mining than statistical methods.

In fact, if at all I can compare it to traditional market research it is in its similarity to qualitative research in terms of the “buzz content” being open-ended. In fact, it does one better than qualitative research in the sense that all the comments are completely unbiased, unsolicited and therefore truly spontaneous. The setting itself is natural compared to the artificial setting of a Focus Group discussion.

To sum the differences between traditional research and social media research:

Traditional Market Research	Social Media Research
Periodic Studies	All the time intelligence in real time
Asking questions/ moderating discussions	Listening
Inductive/ Reflective	Directional
Fieldwork	Online research
Statistical Tools	Search/ blog tools/ Social Media tools
Requires extrapolation to the population	Requires data mining and distillation

Tagged with: intelligence • listening • market research • real time • research • SMM • Social Media Listening • spontaneous feedback

Feb 13

Why organisations should listen…

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It never ceases to surprise me that there are organizations that still wonder why they should listen to social media. Listening organizations are simply more responsive and that does have a direct correlation with the brand’s reputation and yes indeed, sales.

Here is a case in point that a friend shared with us recently.

He was looking for a book and found it on a site called Infibeam. But he hadn’t heard of them. So he visited their site but was not convinced. Then he googled, read a blog, and ordered his book.

Why did our friend decide to buy from Infibeam?

Because he saw this blog post dated ‘Tuesday 9 February 2010′ titled ‘Infibeam Rocks‘ on a blogger’s site.

It seems this student had bought the wrong book on Infibeam and there’s no way to cancel after making payment. When he realized his mistake, he went back to the site and checked the FAQs and found that they don’t support cancellation of orders after payment has been made.

Having realized that there was nothing he could do about the situation and understandably disturbed about the whole thing, he decided to tweet about it. Later, he received a few missed calls on his phone from a strange number followed by an email from Infibeam saying that they had received his request for cancellation of his order through twitter.com. And they offered to credit his Infibeam account with the amount which could be then used for next purchase.

They cancelled his order and refunded the amount. His reaction is absolute delight.

What the blogger says about Infibeam

“I don’t know about you, but I’m very impressed by their customer service. The fact that they took the initiative to monitor twitter for tweets mentioning “Infibeam” for any problems that users face is a strong indication that they aren’t just some random E-Store. They have definitely made a permanent customer out of me!”

So why should organizations listen?

So they can respond to customers
So they can convert one-time customers to life-long customers
So they can generate positive word-of-mouth
So they can get new customers

Tagged with: customer feedback • listening • positive word-of-mouth • research • responsiveness • SMM • Social Media Blogs • Social Media Listening • spontaneous feedback

Jan 25

Can Insight be automated?

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Software, technology and BI tools are taking over. The charting, graphing is all very exciting. The amounts of data processed and the speeds at which it is done is indeed staggering. But, here’s my question. Is this really taking us closer to the interest group we are studying or further away?

Take social media monitoring tools for example. They are wonderful, as I have said in an earlier post, but only as a start point.

Like Nathan Gilliat says in his article On the (Non-) Automation of Insight, “Social media analysis tools are software; they do some of the work, but to get the most out of them, you need someone who knows how to use them. Regardless of the tools used, at some point people take over. It may be earlier in the process (manual content analysis) or later (analysis and reporting), but eventually, a person takes what the computer produces and does something with it.” Another brilliant article by the same author compares the value of human-assisted software analysis versus software-assisted human analysis. Either way, software alone is not enough.

Another very simple take on the matter is by Mark Goren in his blog post Social media monitoring He writes, “It’s easy to look at numbers and statistics. It’s fun to watch your influence and reach grow far and wide across the web. However, if you’re not bothering to click through and read, don’t bother at all. All the real insights come from reading.”

That is my position too. Eventually, whether you use a 600$ a month subscription for a tool or use some of the brilliant free tools available, someone (ideally with a qualitative research frame-of-mind) will have to read through the actual posts and draw insights from that.

If you have a take on this topic, please share it here.

Tagged with: automated • insight • SMM • Social Media Listening • tools for social media

Jan 21

SMM Tools – What they cannot do

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In an earlier post, I have said how amazing some of the social media monitoring tools are as a start point for any social media based research.

Here are some of the limitations of what any tool can provide, in my opinion:

1) Keywords: Most of the social media monitoring tools available today have a mechanism of identifying the top keywords associated with a search term, but really what does this tell you? For instance, how is it helpful to get a list of say words like bharti, telecom, mobile, india, free, subscribe etc, when you search for comments on Airtel. Does it evoke a picture of the attitudes and perceptions surrounding the brand or the hot themes/ topics surrounding the brand that are being discussed?

2) Natural language processing: Some of the professional tools available have a NLP component in them but what happens to typos, which social media is full of, sentiments that are not just positive or negative but fall into a thousand shades in between, and what about subtleties, nuances, irony? And most importantly, in a country like India, a lot of the comments in social media use the English script but the words could be Hindi, Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam or any of the other Indian languages. What happens to standard NLP when faced with that kind of variety of expression?

3) Sentiment Tagging: First of all, sentiment is not merely positive, negative or neutral. Human sentiments would be hard to measure and quantify, even in the best of scenarios, but let us start by acknowledging that there is a very vast range of sentiments possible. And even in this simplistic positive-negative model, ordinarily the SM tool tags a statement like ” Good show, he got thrown out” as a positive sentiment based on the word ‘good’ in the comment. Bloopers like this are a matter of course in using SM tools.

Tagged with: NLP • research • sentiment tagging • SMM • Social Media Blogs • Social Media Listening • tools for social media • trends

Jan 20

SMM Tools – A start point

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Here’s my two bits on the social media monitoring tools available today. The ones mentioned in this post are the free tools, but even the paid tools will have mostly the same pluses and minuses.

The positives first – an SMM tool is of course, the best and most logical place to start if you want to track the visibility of a brand or issue. All of them do pull out the posts that match the search term and present the same to you. Some are better organized than others. Icerocket and socialmention.com are two great start points for any search. And of course, there are a plethora of twitter specific tools like twazzup, monitter, twitalyzer and tweetbeep.

Visibility stats or scores are fairly interesting measures as provided by the tools. Of course, one must remember to cross-verify these numbers across tools, so as to not propagate the tool bias. Howsociable has its own visibility score and personally, I find their simple presentation of various SM sources, a great portal page to start the drill-down to the actual comments and posts.

Another interesting graph or chart some of them provide is one that compares the number of mentions of a certain keyword (brand) vs. another. Definitely an indicator of sorts, even if you then use your own methodology to confirm this. Trendpedia is a great example of comparison charting.

Most of the tools will also give some idea of the key influencers who are talking about the brand or issue and that is certainly useful.

My next post will be on what the tools cannot do and why a human analyst is required to derive anything meaningful out of social media monitoring.

Tagged with: facebook • research • SMM • Social Media Blogs • Social Media Listening • tools for social media • trends • twitter

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