Almost a year ago, Brian Kress wrote about the importance of capturing conversations online and the options for measurement out there, from DIY solutions to robust buzz monitoring partners.
Since then, the demand for capturing conversations has only grown. Our agency has invited many of the best services in the industry to walk us through their capabilities in the space and how partnering with them would provide real value to our clients. And our clients themselves are increasingly curious about what’s being said about them in the marketplace by consumers.
Through all this activity, the one question that we’ve been hearing over and over is “so what do I do with this?” Sure, it’s great that we now have the capability to capture, in real-time, what people on Twitter, in the blogs and on forums are saying about our brand. But more than just the volume of conversation, whether it’s positive or negative and some links to actual conversations, what action can we take as marketers with this new source of data about our brand and consumers?
From a PR perspective, it’s fairly easy. The ability to track relevant conversations as they arise in real-time gives you the opportunity to address them, whether it be calming and addressing negative sentiment or encouraging and reinforcing positive sentiment. But from a research perspective, it gets tougher. How do you wade through the sometimes enormous amount of data (in the case of large brands that are frequently talked about) to find interesting insights of truth or give credence to the few mentions that appear (in the case of smaller, less talked about brands), hoping that it’s not just the vocal minority?
As a brand steward, buzz monitoring tools are incredibly useful to keep a real-time pulse on the brand, but it isn’t the research tool that will single-handedly make you rich with insights. It’s one tool in an arsenal of research tools and one particularly suited to partner with other forms of research. Here are a few ways you can use buzz monitoring with other research tools to make insights much more actionable:
1) Use secondary resources like Iconoculture or Mintel to support or dismiss insights we’re seeing in buzz monitoring. I’ll demonstrate this with a silly scenario to get the point across. Say you have a used clothing retailer brand who notices in their buzz monitoring tool that there’s an increase in volume of people using their product in games of “capture the flag.” Rather than dismiss this as simply a vocal minority, you could see if this trend was appearing in secondary research reports, where you might see that “capture the flag” is experiencing a resurgence in popularity or that flag making companies have been going out of business, leaving these consumers nowhere else to turn. In this case, secondary research could help put some weight (or dismiss) a discovery in the buzz monitoring tool.
2) Conduct primary research using insights discovered in buzz monitoring to see if those ideas have legs. If the tool leads to an insight that a brand has already considered or is much closer to their core business model, it may be worth conducting primary research or adding on to an existing piece of research to see how well that idea plays out in a group setting.
3) Deploy a quick quantitative online survey to get a sense of if a certain mindset scales across the demographic you’re targeting. One aspect of buzz monitoring that is often difficult to gauge is the demographics of the people talking about your brand. In this case, buzz monitoring would pair beautifully with a piece of quantitative research. Recruit respondents who fit your target market and then share the ideas that you’ve seen in buzz monitoring to see how well they do with your best customers (or potential customers).
The key is to use the tools we have at our disposal to come up with a more complete analysis, not looking at buzz monitoring in a vacuum.
At the end of the day, we have to remember that buzz monitoring is a much more passive form of research than traditional qualitative or quantitative, where we have much more control. Unless our clients have a robust social media response team, we typically can’t probe when consumers bring up an interesting insights on a blog. We can’t write the discussion guide and require our Facebook fans to fill out all the questions. And we don’t even know if MrBigMan83 is even a man. We’re here to listen. And by listening, we might get a nugget of insight that we could use as we look at our client’s business using all the tools we have at our disposal – buzz monitoring being just one of them.
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