How To Create Brand Names Worthy of Social Media

Friday, January 8th, 2010

Why do brand names matter? For one, brand names are how consumers instantly recognize who and what you are. Brand names let consumers find you and talk about you with ease and clarity.

What makes a great brand name? Great brand names are instantly recognizable by everyone. Who doesn’t know what products are created by Chrysler, Coca-Cola, or Walmart? Just hearing these words conjures up images of each of the products. However, social media brings a new consideration for branding, namely, would you be able to find your own brand name if you were to search for it on the internet?

Let’s consider Chrysler. Is there any possible way that someone would use the word “Chrysler” to refer to anything other than an automotive company? A search for Chrysler on the internet brings up nothing but mentions of vehicles, a perfect scenario. Let’s now consider Coca-Cola. As with Chrysler, an internet search of Coca-Cola brings up nothing but mentions of the beverage. But wait… how does the average consumer talk about Coca-Cola? Not as Coca-Cola but simply as coke.  A search of the word “coke” brings up many non-beverage mentions. In fact, interspersed among many legitimate uses of the word, this search returns many, many results for a very addictive and illegal drug. This is certainly not a best case scenario for social media monitoring. The task of separating which mentions of  “I’m addicted to coke” refer to the beverage versus the drug is an intricate process. But, brand recognition for Coca-Cola is so incredible that it would be extremely detrimental for them to rebrand simply to accommodate social media. Who else might have some difficulty? How about “The Gap” or “Target,” both stores with great brand recognition but extremely low uniqueness in terms of their name.

Other brands have gone through the rebranding process, though clearly not with social media in mind. Electrasol, a wonderful and 100% unique brand name, recently rebranded its dishwashing detergent to “Finish.” A quick search on the internet reveals that this new name will make the task of picking out conversations of the detergent extremely difficult. The same must be said for Dominion, a grocery store which recently rebranded to “Metro.” Given the widespread use of the word metro to refer to subway trains and metropolitan areas, this chain will also have difficulties taking advantage of social media.

On the other hand, some brands have made great decisions. Changing “Indian Shaving Products Limited” to “Gillette” was a great move. Gillette is a word that would rarely be used to mean anything other than the shaving products company. They should have no fear that their search results will return vast quantities of irrelevant data. Who else might navigate the social media waters with ease? How about Nissan, Molson, IBM, and Radioshack. Instantly recognizable and unique names ripe for social media research.

Congratulations to Coca-Cola, the #1 Global Brand in 2009

Thursday, January 7th, 2010

Coca-Cola was recently named the best global brand by Interbrand with a value of over 68,734 million dollars. This ranking holds from last year and, in fact, represents 3% growth in the brand’s value.  How does this look in the social media world?

Though the beverage of the same name is only a portion of that overall success, we can look at overall feelings towards both Coca-Cola and Pepsi over the last 4 quarters. In terms of pure sentiment, Coke was more successful than Pepsi throughout the entire year.

One of the reasons for this could be consistently higher satisfaction with Coca-Cola television commercials. On a five point scale, satisfaction levels for Coke commercials over the last several months averaged 3.6 compared to a lower 3.2 for Pepsi. Given that thousands of verbatims contributed to these results, statistical significance is high and the conclusion can be drawn that Coca-Cola commercials are preferred. In addition, when considering discussions of business operations such as strategies, operations, and regulations, Coca-Cola again pulls ahead of Pepsi. Compared to an average score of 3.52 for Coke and an average score of 3.43 for Pepsi, this trend, which is consistent over the entire year, continues to put Coke ahead of Pepsi.

Can Coca-Cola maintain the momentum for a third year?

Conversition Strategies officially launches evolisten: Social media market research

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

New York, NY, January 6, 2010 – Conversition Strategies, the architect behind sentiment giant www.tweetfeel.com and opinion network www.mattermeter.com, has officially released its flagship social media market research product evolisten™

Built by market research experts for the market research industry, evolisten™ is new process for creating valid and reliable research from a non-traditional data source, social media data. It combines the scientific principles of both qualitative and quantitative research into a proprietary process that results in meaningful and actionable research.

evolisten™ follows strict processes for seeking out and identifying relevant social media data. Data is funneled through numerous data quality processes, analyzed with a proprietary hierarchical sentiment engine, and sampled and weighted. More than 600 specific key measures and their norms, including the marketing mix measures (product, placement, pricing, promotion) and the traditional research measures (purchasing, recommendations, trial) are tracked on a daily basis. Because of these features, Jean Davis indicates that, “clients are telling us they have seen many offerings of social media data, but evolisten finally offers real social media research.”

Tessie Ting adds, “Clients feel really comfortable with evolisten because they have the choice of carrying out their own analyses with the customized portal or they can choose a product from our full service products.” evolisten™ includes a suite of products, namely evoClarity, evoSeg, evoConnect, and evoAdScan, to provide brand equity, usage and attitude, segmentation, ad and campaign tracking, and customer experience research needs.

We speak research, not buzz or tech.

About Conversition Strategies:

Conversition Strategies is a boutique online market research firm based in the US (Conversition Strategies Limited) and Canada (Conversition Strategies Incorporated).  Conversition listens to consumers by applying scientific principles to the collection and analysis of social media data. Its strength lies in combining the expertise of globally respected market researchers with social media mavens.

From Buzz to Biz: The Case for Social Media Research

Monday, January 4th, 2010

Buzz monitoring is a popular topic these days but what exactly is it? In simple terms, buzz monitoring, or social media monitoring, consists of searching the internet for mentions of brand names, and determining how many times and where they are mentioned. Buzz monitoring lets you identify when something substantial has occurred in the internet space because the volume of chatter has suddenly changed. Sometimes, the monitoring is taken to a second stage where someone representing the brand investigates individual search findings to respond to the people who made the comment. This is a form of customer relationship management at the individual level. Buzz monitoring can let you be in the know as soon as chatter about your brand changes.

On the other hand, social media research is not an extension of buzz monitoring, but rather an extension of marketing research. While it’s good to know how much chatter is taking place and where it is taking place, it’s far more important to understand the qualities of that chatter. Social media research is marketing research without the questionnaire and the focus group. Social media research allows you to understand the attitudes and beliefs that a large cross-section of people have towards a brand. Instead of gathering survey results from several hundred people, this style of research gathers thousands of data points from thousands of people on topics that actually matter to them.

The possibilities are endless. What are your consumers talking about? Are they focusing on the good or the bad? Are they discussing wishes and wants or failures and detractions? What topics do consumers feel are important or need more attention? Why are consumers buying, or not buying, a product? In addition to identifying these key topics, social media research lets you measure them. How do these results compare to similar brands? Are perceptions of your brand significantly better or just slightly better? Is the change over time meaningful or just the changing chatter of a few over-vocal critics.

This is how monitoring social media changes from just buzz to business.