The ARF: Is Social Media the New Marketing Research? - Lynne d Johnson - MediaBizBloggers
Welcome Lynne d Johnson our newest MediaBizBlogger
Consumer behavior has significantly changed over the past five years. Technological tools, primarily on the social web and on mobile phones, have given consumers more power in becoming a partner in creating the brand narrative than ever before. It no longer matters what you tell consumers your product can do in an ad. What matters today, is what their peers (or the average user, say a peer representative) tell them your product can do. And for the most part, marketing gets that.
Marketing, as an industry, is moving swiftly to embrace social media as an integral part of the marketing mix. Integrated marketing services provider, Alterian, recently found in its seventh annual study that out of 1068 marketing professionals worldwide, 66% will be investing in social media marketing (SMM) in 2010. Of those, 40% said they would be shifting more than a fifth of their traditional direct marketing budget towards funding their SMM activities.
Customer service and customer relationship management get the importance of social media and is adapting it rapidly. Think of the BestBuy Twelpforce on Twitter, or Comcastcares on Twitter, or even Coca-Cola or Us Weekly practicing CRM on Facebook, or Clorox's green blog "Shades of Green Journal."
Social media isn't going away anytime soon, and it's becoming more central to how consumers talk about and interact with brands. According to a study, 20% of tweets mention brands, and brands like Coca-Cola have millions of fans on Facebook.
That's exactly where using social media as a listening tool in the market research area has become critical. Yet at the ARF, we're finding that market researchers are more willing to cite the challenges of listening:
1) what are we listening for?
2) who are we listening to?
3) where does listening belong?
4) where is the statistical rigor?
5) how do we allocate resources to listening;
rather than talk about its benefits. And, it's as ARF President Bob Barocci notes, one today's purest forms of market research.
That's one of the reasons we published the ARF Listening Playbook, where we definite listening as a means for tapping into the naturally occurring conversations and behavioral signals in social media and search to hear changes and vocabulary and to sense the next big thing.
Brands can use listening to:
1) discover new customers
2) develop new products
3) give the consumer a voice
4) take brand pulse
5) understand shifts in consumer perspectives
But that's not all. With phone surveys going out the door, and the dawn of online surveys and panels, and market research online communities (MROC) being upon us, it's important to learn how to integrate the natural flow of unguided, honest conversations into the traditional world of research. Listening tools that track online buzz or perform sentiment analysis, can help us capture fact and opinion, just as we would with surveys or in private communities. We of course have to understand social media better to make this sort of market research for us.
The only way for us to get there, to overcome all of the challenges, is to move beyond the point of just toe tipping. It's time to jump in and really see how the water feels. This week, at our Industry Leader Forum event in San Francisco, we'll be learning how brands like Kraft, vitaminwater, and Toyota dived in to develop successful listening strategies that significantly impacted their brands. Check back next week for a report.
Lynne d Johnson is SVP, Social Media for the Advertising Research Foundation. She can be reached at lynne@thearf.org and on Twitter: @lynneluvah.
