The last year has brought a groundswell of mainstream marketers integrating social media considerations into their marketing-communication planning. My last post talked about the potential for achieving marketing ‘co-creation’ as one outcome and as a way to improve marketing personalization. In fact, venues such as blogs and Twitter have become indispensable tools for PR functionaries, and forums such as Facebook and LinkedIn are presenting new opportunities for ‘micro-targeting’ of advertisements and offers based on social graphs.
The next frontier is leveraging social media to innovate the process of new product/service development (NPSD) — supporting co-creation in this arena. The fact that social media is interactive, honest, transparent and potentially highly targeted presents tremendous opportunities for garnering incredibly-valuable insights into customers’ wants and needs. In fact, at a time when marketing researchers are questioning structured surveys and they are pushing for more observational, behavioral and ethnographic research, social media represents a way to evolve the process of insight-based marketing to the next level.
“In the age of social media, I would argue that this is becoming easier, not harder,” commented Liz Moise with Boston-area marketing firm BluePoint Venture Marketing in a recent post on the firm’s blog. “… [Y]ou can get online and find your customers. You can listen in on their conversations, or grievances. You can speak to them directly.”
Social media is also an important tool to help brand-companies respond to the fundamental power shift in NPSD — from ‘brand push’ to ‘customer pull.’ Customers are at the center of their universe more than ever. Brand-companies must contend with a highly-sophisticated customer with many options and choices in the marketplace. Understanding the nuances of a customer’s needs is critical — especially when it comes to the aspects of a customer’s existence you are not servicing today.
“As a business, you ought to be watching how people — especially your customers — are expressing themselves outside the context of being your customers,” commented social media marketing guru Amber Naslund on her Altitude Branding blog earlier this month. “They’re multi-dimensional people … .”
But what is the best way to approach social media as a tool for marketing research and for NPSD innovation? What is a framework we can use to better match social-media platforms with our objectives for garnering customer insights?
Approaches to integrating social media into the NPSD process range from idea/innovation aggregation sites, such as halfbakery, to the social-media monitoring system built by Information Resources, Inc. (IRI), a provider of syndicated consumer insights to to the CPG world. IRI built a system to “… glean product and industry intelligence by ‘listening’ to unfiltered conversations taking place on social networking sites, blogs, chatrooms, message boards, and other consumer-generated media,” according to a March company press release. “Customers can then integrate this research data with other research to develop products more in tune with consumer interests, as well as launch and promote them more effectively.”
Regardless of the approach, the key is to choose the right medium for the right task at hand. Below I’ve presented a working normative framework for thinking about approaching social media in this context.
What is the best way to assess and align the ‘point of view’ of various social media platforms with our marketing research/NPSD objectives?
One way to look at social media platforms is to consider two issues — the context of the customer-brand relationship and the nature of engagement via the social-media platform — in a 2×2 matrix. Doing so allows us to then assess the relative positions of various social-media platforms and to understand how the insights gleaned from these platforms are different.
> Context of customer-brand relationship refers to the degree to which interaction with a brand-company was the primary motivator for a customer’s engagement in that social-media platform. This is arranged on a continuum from low context (such as building a LinkedIn profile, which is primarily about a customers’ own life and not at all motivated by engagement with a brand-company) to high context (such as commenting about a product on Amazon or seeking out a corporate blog, which is clearly motivated by engagement with a brand-company).
> Nature of engagement (observation vs. surveying) refers to the role of the marketing researcher in the platform. This is arranged on a continuum from passive engagement (such as reading an individual’s personal blog) to active engagement (such as putting questions on Twitter and observing responses).
Below I’ve made a first attempt at placing key social-media platforms within this framework.
Source: Adam Needles, Propelling Brands (original)
What are some other considerations for best aligning the capabilities of social-medial platforms with marketing research objectives?
Beyond the context of customer-brand relationship and the nature of engagement, there are other factors to be considered.
> B2B vs. B2C: Are you going after a business user or a traditional consumer? Different platforms have different orientations. For example, LinkedIn tends to have a professional user base; whereas, MySpace and Facebook are more traditionally forums for socializing among consumers. This may be an obvious consideration, but it’s worth keeping in mind.
> Narrow vs. wide targeting: Are you attempting to go after a very specific ethnographic segment, or is your goal to reach the widest group possible? Different platforms lend themselves to different NPSD needs; moreover, the capability of different platforms to provide insight into social graphs varies.
> Representativeness of the sample: This is something that is always important in any type of marketing research, but it is critical in a social-media arena where perspectives might be skewed by early adopters and Lead Users. How representative is the sample of groups represented on a social media platform to your larger target customer population? It may be tough to know this with statistical accuracy; however, we can at least embrace the concept of proportionality and work to ensure that we weight our consideration of insights in accurate proportion to the makeup of our larger customer base.
What’s next? What do you think?
As always, this dialogue is just beginning.
- What are your comments on my normative framework, above?
- Do you think the social media platforms listed are in the right place within the framework?
- Are you using social media for NPSD today?
- What are your opinions on the opportunities and limitations of social media for NPSD?
Adam, great discussion. I think there’s an important aspect of the evolving way of bringing new products to market that combines two things; what social media is bringing to the table in terms of customer involvement in the conversation, and what development processes are evolving towards with fast, iterative, customer focused methodologies. The two trends are very similar in that actual involvement, rather than abstract surveying, is the critical factor for getting true feedback on what a customer will derive value from.
@ Steven – I agree with your POV on this. The critical piece, as you cite, is getting real feedback — not fake, structured or overly interpreted feedback — but real insights that can lead to true development and innovation.
I think that also points to a challenge, though, for how marketing researchers use the mediums. It’s necessary to abandon some of the body of knowledge around surveying to be successful.
Personally, I think that the emerging practice of ethnography is very instructive of techniques that will translate well to social media.
I’m also a proponent of using text analysis — especially via tools from SPSS and SAS — to aggregate insights across chat/Tweet streams.
Great discussion Adam, I would add that the honesty of feedback in the social media arena is key. If a brand or company is truly looking to hear what their customers think of them, a quick trip down twitter lane (or whichever social medium their customers use most) will give them insights they never would have gathered from years of traditional surveying and information gathering. However, brands need to be prepared to DO SOMETHING about it, if they engage with customers in this way. I can imagine this kind of engagement is helpful for NPSD to your point, but also for customer engagement.
I recently did a bit of quick research for a prospective client and found that their customers, at least those on twitter, were quite unhappy with their service level and pricing model. If appropriate, I may suggest to the client that that they listen in. If they can do something to improve the situation for individual customers, they have the potential to turn these unhappy customers in to happy evangelists. This was a lesson learned by @JetBlue when they first began using twitter as a customer service tool. A happy evangelist on twitter goes a long way!
I concur with the prior comment (lmoise) regarding the importance of being culturally prepared to listen and act on the insights gleaned from social media tools. Many marketing execs are prone to hubris and may brush off such commentary as the murmurs of a few disgruntled miscreants. This is especially likely for brand managers who view their brands as their children and act like defensive parents when they perceive their progeny as under attack. Thus, as educators, we should be instilling a good measure of humility into future brand managers and foster a sense of respect for the ideas of others. This is a quality that is clearly evident in “Propelling Brands” and perhaps one of the reasons for the success of your blog.
Adam thanks for this post, I think you’ve really put your finger on something important here.
The process of NPSD using co-creation techniques is a complex one – i think the dilemma is how to you extract something of real value from ‘unfiltered’ conversations? While I agree that the raw and unbiased nature of social media interactions has real qualititive value, ultimately the unstructured nature of the space they occur in means it is difficult for us as consultants to identify which ideas represent breakthroughs.
By guiding the conversation in tailored online communities – which i think should be located somewhere down the bottom right of your framework – brands can engage in real CO-creation in which the conversation is genuinly two-way.
@ lmoise – I was thinking about your comment about gathering insights from Twitter. What struck me is the fact that in a structured surveying environment, there are things that marketing researchers wouldn’t even think to ask — meaning there are insights they would not know how to get at. That’s why using an environment such as Twitter for observational and ethnographic research can be so valuable.
The next step, as you rightly call out, is doing something about it — which can be challenging for some companies. I’m reminded of the analogy from the supply chain world that most supply chains are good at moving things in one direction — e.g., box from manufacturer to store — but aren’t so good in the opposite — e.g., a customer return. As marketers we should ask ourselves if we’re ready to handle coments and insights we didn’t expect BUT should act on — insights that are going against the direction we built our marketing apparatus to handle.
@ Aric – I think you did a great job of calling out the next challenge, which is the cultural context. We too often treat growing a brand like the Spanish Inquisition and attempt to convert everyone, balking at those who will not. Yet those who will not are often our most valuable resource. Why? Those are the ones we really want to be talking to, but too often, as you say, hubris stands in the way.
@ Tony – You raise a good point. This is the practical side of making co-creation work. I would differ, slightly, in my opinion, though, by saying that we have the tools today to do this. SAS and SPSS, among others, have some incredibly sophsisticated text analysis capabilities (as do firms such as Leximancer, which I profiled on my site a month or two ago). They can not only find associtions between words and phrases, they can aggregate this insight and show us critical idea networks through visual representations. Manya Mayes (Twitter @ManyaMayes) with SAS would be a good resource to Tweet with. I know it can be tough to approach unstructured data, but it really just means we need new tools.
Saw a great post today from Ken Burbary (@kenburbary).
This is a phenomenal tutorial on how to more-effectively search Twitter to monitor and mine conversations — very useful tool for developing Twitter-based customer insights in an NPSD context.
Check it out:
http://www.kenburbary.com/2009/01/mine-the-gold-in-social-media-through-conversation-search/
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