Baby, it’s cold outside!
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Though the holiday season is over and we are no longer singing Christmas songs, baby, it’s still cold outside. Dry skin, chapped lips, cracked hands are all common occurrences during the winter so this is the perfect time to review the performance of a few skincare brands over the last year.

For three popular brands, Aveeno, Nivea and Olay, we gathered hundreds of thousands of opinions from across the social media space. We then plotted the percentage of verbatims that were positive over a time span from January 2011 to December 2011. The trend lines are quite positive and reasonably stable across the entire year. In most cases, at least 40% of all verbatims were positive and Olay consistently led the pack.

But wait! What is the drastic drop Nivea saw in August when the percentage of comments that were positive dropped from about 44% down to 32%? It certainly wasn’t a seasonal trend as neither Aveeno nor Olay experienced a similar change. What happened in August to set the social media space on fire?

When we dive into the data, two popular topics bubbled to the top – advertisements and racism. Indeed, people were talking about a specific Nivea advertisement and they were furious.

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Many perceived the advertising image to be racist, and comments and opinions rolled in from polls, tweets, online newspapers and all other forms of social media. Here are a few (masked) verbatims taken from social media:
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• “Is this ad also offensive to anyone else out there????”
• “The ad has to be trashed. I’m not buying a NIVEA product as long as this terrible ad is on the air.”
• “I don’t know who the f*** their advertising team is, but they dropped the ball big time”
• “Won’t be using Nivea aftershave anymore. Let’s see how they do WITHOUT my UN-CIVILED DOLLARS”

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Indeed, if we track sentiment daily in August, we can see the precise day when the advertisement caused the stir – August 18. And, we can see the precise day when Nivea issued an apology – August 19, the day sentiment reached its lowest point and began the long climb back up.

Both of the above charts illustrate the sometimes short attention span of consumers. After an apology from Nivea, consumers quickly forgave them and forgot about the ad. Sentiment returned to normal fluctuations.

Perhaps it’s the power of an apology, but it’s more likely the power of a strong brand that pulled them through.

By Jennifer O’Brien

Happy New Year! Did you make a resolution for 2012? Many did and I’m sure that ‘shed a few pounds’ was at the top of the list for many people. Television commercials advertising weight loss programs are plentiful right now as weight loss companies vie for your hard-earned dollars. As always, celebrities are a key component of their commercials.  Jennifer Hudson has been the face of Weight Watchers for some time, and new commercials feature Mariah Carey using the Jenny Craig diet and Janet Jackson using Nutrisystem.

But does having the favorite celeb also mean having the favorite program?  Let’s take a look at what social media has to say.

We gathered hundreds of thousands of verbatims from thousands of different websites and evaluated opinions toward three weight loss companies. The first chart below shows opinions reflecting the spokesperson for each of the three companies. Although the percentage of comments that are negative (red) is about 14% to 16%  for all three brands, there is a higher percentage of positive comments (green) for Janet Jackson (29.8% positive).  The smallest percentage of positive comments goes to Mariah Carey (23.3% positive) while Jennifer Hudson (26.6% positive) sits in the middle.

Based on these results, Nutrisystem is winning the celebrity contest.  Does this mean their program is also preferred?

The next chart shows the percentage of comments/messages/ status updates that were scored as negative (red), neutral (blue) and positive (green) for each of the three companies overall.  This time, Weight Watchers has the lowest percent of negative comments (8.6%) AND the highest percentage of positive comments (33.5%), making it the social media fan favorite. Nutrisystem comes in second with 12.4% of comments being negative and 29.1% being positive. Finally Jenny Craig has the highest percentage of negative comments (14.0%) and the lowest percentage of positive comments (28.2%).

So what is our conclusion? The favored celebrity does not make the favored program. We love you Janet Jackson, but Weight Watchers is in the lead.

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Related links
Social media monitoring vs social media research: Can you see the difference?
The Conversition Hierarchy of Social Media Insight
Coke it is! Or not. I’m not sure. I can’t tell.
Apple pie, Apple orchard, Apple cider, or Apple iPad
Battle of the Brands: Blackberry vs iPhone

Click here to register

Learn to Love Blogging and Twittering: A MRIA Workshop led by Annie Pettit
St Andrews Club and Conference Centre, Toronto, ON
Tuesday Jan 24, 2012 

8:30-9:00am - Includes continental breakfast
9am-Noon - Workshop with coffee/tea and break snacks

Objective:
To become familiar with the art of blogging and tweeting so that you can actively participate in and benefit from the social media space

Who will benefit?
This workshop will benefit those who are thinking of writing a blog and learning how to tweet. These are quickly becoming social media requirements for establishing a prominent presence and promoting yourself, your product, your service or company.

Learn about:

• the basics of starting to tweet and blog
• the different types of twitter clients and blogs
• the tricks, shortcuts  and tips about tweeting and blogging
• the language, including hashtags, 140, bit.ly, RSS
• tweetdeck, socialoomph, Klout, RSS and other third
  party plugins and apps
• the multi-interaction with Twitter via your cell, rss feeds, email
• promoting your blogs and getting yourself tweeted and retweeted
• what works and what does not work in being successful tweeters and bloggers

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Workshop Presenter
Annie Pettit is VP, Research Standards at Research Now and Chief Research Officer at Conversition, an e-Rewards company. She is the author of two blogs, Lovestats and the Conversition blog. She is an active tweeter @lovestats in the market research arena and also with her sugar and spice passion (@LoveStats/sugar-and-spice). Check out the Sugar and Spice Online News Daily. She is a frequent speaker at MR conferences, has over 5000 followers, and has tweeted 13,500 times! She is highlighted on the front cover of the October 2011 issue of VUE and wrote an article inside entitled “You know more than you think!”

Workshop:
This is a highly interactive workshop and spaces are limited to 50 seats. You must bring your own laptop and be prepared to tweet.

MCP points: 10

Don’t worry! If you missed the Esomar webinar, here are the slides for you to enjoy on your own. Welcome to the summer of Tea Parties and Turmoil: Measuring the summer of riots in London

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81 Percent of Market Research Agencies Agree Social Media can Complement Insights Generated by Traditional Research Methods
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Toronto, ON – October 27, 2011 – Conversition, a pioneer in the Social Media Research industry, recently surveyed 601 clients of Research Now to determine their usage and attitudes towards social media data platforms for the purposes of measuring consumer engagement and gaining consumer insights.

Conversition conducted a 15 minute study focused on the usage of social media monitoring tools and technology to engage consumers, or gain insight into their existing or emerging needs. In order to fully comprehend the potential that the Social Media Monitoring & Analysis (SMMA) industry has in different markets, Conversition surveyed Research Now clients based in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada.

The findings showed highly encouraging results for an industry quickly being adopted by researchers. In particular, responses regarding the use of social media for insight purposes illustrates that SMMA has entered the „early majority‟ within prime English-speaking markets. More specifically, 81 percent of all market research agencies (MRAs) surveyed agree that SMMA can complement insights from custom and/or ad hoc quantitative and qualitative research.

When asked specifically about the potential that SMMA has:

• 65 percent of all responding companies agree that SMMA will become a substantial channel for market research in the future.
• 63 percent of all responding companies agree that SMMA has immense potential to drive consumer insights.

“What’s clear from the study is that the market research community is ‘switching on’ to the power and insight potential of social media data,” commented Michael Mayers, Vice President of Business Development at Conversition.

The survey also found that:

• 85 percent of MRAs believe that human intervention is still needed to maintain the quality of social media data.
• 58 percent of MRAs believe that data quality issues (e.g. spam, erroneous data, and difficulty of understanding the demographic profile of respondents) currently restrict the use of SMMA for insight purposes.

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Mayers adds, “Social media data represents an emerging research channel, and data from social media can be a rich source of information for consumer insights. At the same time, perceptions over data quality are an issue, and our response is that whether managed by the client or the vendor, social media data requires the involvement of experienced and knowledgeable humans to provide those all important checks and balances.”

Methodology
Fieldwork was conducted between August 19 and September 15, 2011 among 601 clients of Research Now based in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. The breakdown by country was as follows: United States (344), United Kingdom (165) and Canada (91).

About Conversition
Conversition is an online social media data collection business unit based in Toronto, Canada and New York, NY. 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 respected market researchers with an in-depth understanding of social media.

About Research Now
Research Now is the leading global online sampling and online data collection company. With over 6 million panelists in 38 countries worldwide, Research Now enables companies to listen to and interact with real consumers and business decision makers in order to make key business decisions. Research Now offers a full suite of data collection services, including social media sampling, and operates the Valued Opinions™ Panel and e-Rewards® Opinion Panels. The company has a multilingual staff located in 22 offices around the globe and has been recognized for four consecutive years as the industry leader in client satisfaction. Visit http://www.researchnow.com to learn more.

Press Contact:
Heather Milt
1-206-200-8207
hmilt@researchnow.com

For a copy of the full report, please email hello@conversition.com.

Millions of people, millions of messages, one common feeling about the passing of Steve Jobs.

On Monday, August 22, 2011, Canada lost one of its best. Jack Layton, who led the NDP to its first ever status as the official Opposition, may have lost his battle with cancer, but he won our hearts through decades of passionate service for the Canadian people. It’s very easy to see how much people respected Jack. A simple word cloud of people’s online comments about him will suffice.

“My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.”

For those wishing to express their condolences to his family and friends, or donate to cause in his honour, please click on the images below.

H8ers! <3ers! Isn’t social media just full of people who have radical opinions? It’s been a while since we first shared information about the distribution of opinions/sentiment in social media so we thought it was about time we conducted our little experiment again.

For six different sets of data, we gathered hundreds of thousands of sentiment scores and prepared frequency distributions of the results. As you can see below, some brands have more positive (A, B) sentiment while others have more negative (C, E, F) sentiment. You can also see that some brands have more flat (E) or peeked (C) distributions, or longer tails (A, B). No matter which particular feature of a brand’s chart interests you, it is clear that all of the distributions are reasonably normal, they are generally bell shaped.

So is social media full of haters and lovers? Most definitely not. Most social media data consists of lots of moderate like and dislike, plus a healthy representation of haters and lovers. Now the only puzzle is determining which of these charts reflects the sentiment of 1) autism, 2) Lady Gaga, 3) Obama, 4) Steve Jobs, 5) Toyota, and 6) Walmart.

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Related links
Are Only Crazy People Commenting About Brands in Social Media?
Article in the Vue: Words I’ll Live to Regret
Cell + Survey + SMR: A Social Media Mashup #MRIA2011 #MRA_AC #MRX
There is no question but the research validity question

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There are few things Chart Junkies love more than a clear trend and unfortunately, Netflix has the honour of providing the data for such a chart. Over the last year or so, consumer satisfaction with Netflix has shown a gradual decline. In March 2010, about 40% of online conversations about Netflix were positive but by the end of June 2011, only about 25% of online conversations about Netflix were positive.

The down spikes in Dec 2010 and August 2011 are clear indicators that people don’t like it when prices are increased. But what else are consumers unhappy with? We also gathered satisfaction levels with various attributes of Netflix at two points in time.

First, as represented by the height of the red bar, we see satisfaction in March of 2010. Then, the height of the blue bar shows where satisfaction declined to in June of 2011. About 60% of conversations mentioning Netflix as a favorite (or not a favorite) brand were positive in March 2010 but it declined to barely 20% in June of 2011.

From last year to now, people appreciate the brand less, anticipate using the brand less, and recommend the brand less. They like the servicing less, the ease of use less, and the price less.

And, surprisingly, 10% of people were satisfied with the fees in March 0f 2010, a number which remained stable to now. Hey, some people do appreciate cheap movies.

Related links
Social media monitoring vs social media research: Can you see the difference?
The Conversition Hierarchy of Social Media Insight
Apple pie, Apple orchard, Apple cider, or Apple iPad
Battle of the Brands: Angelina Jolie vs Bacon