The Conversition Hierarchy of Social Media Insight

July 15, 2010 | Comments Off

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is a well known theory of human motivation that starts with meeting our basic physiological needs for food and water, and ups the ante to needs of safety, love, self-esteem and self-actualization. The theory behind Maslow’s hierarchy can be used to understand other processes as well, including the application of the scientific method to terabytes, petabytes, and yottabytes of social media data to create social media insight.

No matter the size of your business, social media matters to you. You want and need to know what consumers are saying about you. There are many different approaches to this learning, each building on the previous stage.

This, we have outlined in the Conversition Hierarchy of Social Media Insight.
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Conversition's Hierarchy of Social Media Insight

1. Stage 1 Happenstance reflects the most basic level of social media data understanding wherein social media information is consumed if and when it happens to come your way. Perhaps employees email YouTube comments to you, or consumers leave postings on your website. What you learn depends upon what you happen to hear.
2. Stage 2 Searching reflects active seeking out of information, such as through the use of an internet search engine like Yahoo, Bing, or Google. The search may be a one time occurrence and likely isn’t exhaustive or representative of all the information that actually exists. This is our ‘Need to Hear.’
3. Stage 3 Alerts is the first attempt to gather information using an unbiased and standardized method. Setting up an alert system through a third party, such as Google Alerts,  gives you access to data from a wide range of sources on a regular basis. Though all relevant data will not be identified, at least the data won’t be biased due to the constraints associated with manual searches. This is our ‘Need to Hear Regularly.’
4. Stage 4 Monitoring is the first attempt to put some rules around the data collection. Search terms are now broader, more comprehensive and higher quality. Data is automatically added to databases which allow you to track the volume and source of data over time. Some offerings even include sentiment analysis such that you can determine overall levels of positive and negative sentiment of the opinions collected. This is our ‘Need to Hear the Masses.’
5. Stage 5 Research is the stage that finally turns data into knowledge. By applying strict scientific principles to the collection and analysis of the gathered opinions, valid and reliable generalizations can be made from data which may otherwise be biased, skewed, and unrepresentative of any population other than itself. Regardless of how much or where the data comes from, it has been assembled in ways that allow you to grasp the opinions of the average online consumer, not just the most talkative online consumer. This is our ‘Need to Hear Validly.’
6. Stage 6 Insight is the last stage, the one that all data fans aspire to. This is where data, which has been properly assembled and analyzed, empowers analysts to create insight, that amazing and powerful idea that comes out of nowhere to guide action plans and strategy.

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May your insights be valid and reliable.

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