Unlike other types of research, social media research has the potential to provide brands with millions of relevant datapoints. That is, of course, as long as sufficient work is put into gathering the right data. What exactly is the right data? If you do Google “BP,” about 200 million records will be found. And given the severity around the situation in the Gulf, the first few hundreds of pages are all about British Petroleum. We carefully gathered thousands of records that specifically related to British Petroleum and created a quick word cloud of the types of companies that were mentioned. Not surprising, energy and finance companies were top of the list.
However, just two months ago, if you had googled “BP,” chances are you would have returned very different data. Perhaps it would have been about Brad Pitt or Basis Points or Blood Pressure, who’s to say? Well, we created a second word cloud that was based on sloppy data collection. Any mention of BP in social media was collected regardless of the context. As you can see in the cloud, BP most commonly stands for Blood Pressure. This is a huge confound that absolutely must be avoided.
Imagine how the research results would be affected if blood pressure data was included with British Petroleum data. We would be astonished that fishermen were using Zocor to try and calm down after watching Inglourious Basterds.
In the last few days, many people have been introduced to the musical instrument called the Vuvuzela. What do we really think of it? Let’s find out! We gathered more than 25 000 verbatims that mentioned the Vuvuzela from across the internet. Then, we conducted a content analysis to evaluate how people were talking about the instrument. Here are the results:
Based strictly on how people talk, the Vuvuzela is compared to a trumpet or french horn, and is much loved in South Africa. It is well-suited to someone wearing a jersey, drinking beer, and sitting in a stadium. No surprises there! So let’s get to the facts, jack!
About 16% of people like it or love it, but about 20% of people find it annoying, offensive, irritating, and obnoxious.
12.4% of people like the sound while another 19% hate the sound. They talk about the noise, the blaring, how deafening it is, and how it can wake the dead.
When people talk about pride, 33% of them feel it is a great way to show their pride in their country but 10% think perhaps there is a better way to show your pride.
In terms of health issues, 39% of people worry about how the instrument can be damaging to hearing. But, almost 2% of people are willing to forgo their hearing for a little bit of fun.
On May 30, 2010, Annie Pettit (@LoveStats) presented the topic of social media research to a packed house at the MRIA conference in Toronto (#MRIA_AC). Enjoy the slides and leave a comment below. We’d love to hear your reactions. Even better, come see us in Boston next week at the MRA conference (#MRIA_AC). We’d love to chat in person!
When do consumers choose to talk about brands in social media?
1) When they’re really, really annoyed and need to vent. 2) When they’re surprisingly pleased and want to share the love.
In fact, those are the messages people love to read. The hate, the disgust, the love, and the adoration make for interesting and provoking reading. These types of messages are also really fun to share with other people because the extreme opinions strike a very deep cord.
As with all things though, there are more than two options. There must always be the neutral or disinterested or uninvolved vote. Some people have wondered whether this third option has any meaningful presence in SM data. Is the neutral vote simply overwhelmed by all of the extreme opinions, or does it actually show up in significant counts? Do we have a bell curve of emotions ranging from negative to positive or a cup curve of emotions that only includes very negative and very positive?
We evaluated the sentiment of three different brands to determine the distribution of 5000 randomly selected scores for each brand. We chose one brand that should skew negative, one that should skew positive, and one that should sit nicely in the middle.
#1 Toyota - We selected Toyota for the obvious reasons. All of the recalls they’ve experienced recently haven’t caused a lot of positive sentiment towards the brand. However, you can clearly see that though the negative side of the curve is well filled in, so is the positive side and the middle section, the neutral section. There is no denying a well rounded bell curve for this set of data.
#2 Taylor Lautner - Again, Taylor was selected for obvious reasons. He has received nothing but positive reviews as of late. It is clear that his sentiment lies more closely on the positive side of the curve, but once again, it does not pile up on the most extreme position. Even among the positives, there is a wide distribution of sentiment.
#3 Walmart – Finally, we selected Walmart as a solid overall brand that hasn’t received any particularly positive or particularly negative review as of late. The distribution of scores is fairly even, and focuses neither solely on the extreme positive nor the extreme negative.
It’s clear that SM does more than elicit extreme positive and extreme negative opinions. In fact, in all three cases, the distribution of opinions ranged nicely from extreme positive all the way to extreme negative. Though the mid-point of the distribution shuffled a bit from left to right, the overall distributions were similar. They may not be perfect bell curves, but there is no other curve that better describes the resulting data (except perhaps a shark fin curve for the Walmart frequency!).
In the offline world, people are more than extremes. They express a wide range of emotions from positive to negative with all points in between. We have just seen that this range of emotions transfers to the online world as well. We’ve definitely got a bell curve of emotions.
At the recent ASTM conference held in St. Louis, Conversition Strategies presented a primer on social media research. Please enjoy the presentation here, though minus the personalized commentary and sense of humour from our presenter, Annie Pettit. Our next conference stop will be MRA in Boston. See you there!
Conversition will be presenting a session on Social Media Research this Friday, April 23rd, in St. Louis, Missouri at the ASTM Committee meeting on Sensory Evaluation. Come join us for a day of great speakers at a great price. Speakers include Derek Sawchuck from Itracks, Frank Hayden from Toluna and Greenfield, Greg Stucky of ResearchNow, and of course, Conversition’s very own Annie Pettit!
The day’s events are billed as a hands-on and interactive one-day workshop designed for all sensory, consumer, and market research practitioners, whether you are currently using technology in your research or not. The morning session will be spent on building a foundation for understanding how technology is best utilized in our research, from building respondent and product databases to respondent selection to data collection and management. The afternoon session will demonstrate and introduce you to techniques and ideas for using technology in your research, both qualitative and quantitative, that you may not have seen or thought of before. You are encouraged to join your peers in exploring the possibilities to transform our work and our organizations through effective use of technology.
“It is a school of thought seemingly embodied by the agency Conversition, which describes itself as a social media research company, as distinct from social media monitoring and social media analysis. “Social media research is the application of scientific marketing research principles to the collection and analysis of social media data such that valid and reliable results are produced,” says the agency’s website.
What this means in practice is that Conversition produces similar outputs to a traditional market research agency, only it sources its data from the social web rather than through surveys. There are some limitations to the approach. Brand or product awareness is impossible to measure, says chief research officer Annie Pettit, explaining that just because someone doesn’t mention a brand in an online conversation doesn’t mean they are unaware of it.
Otherwise, Conversition has most of the basic tracking measures covered. And, says Pettit, it’s wholly possible to use the company’s data to create working predictive models – and why wouldn’t you? “That is the whole purpose of market research,” she says.”
