Fantasise, if you will, about running a focus group, all day… every day, where thousands of attendees emotively discuss your brand and your products candidly and extensively but… you have no-one there taking notes. This is the uniform realisation that many companies of which aren’t engaged in some form of 'Social Listening' are discovering right across the modern marketplace.
It’s hardly a secret that the amount of data available on consumers and their online purchasing activity has exploded over the last five years or so. An exponential growth-surge in open source intelligence matched only by the voracious hunger of marketeers – all primed to engorge themselves on data, and fuelled by a fervent hope of improving client business outcomes. As such it should come as no surprise that the online tools required to satiate this hunger have become both universally more essential and categorically more sophisticated.
Enter the Social Listener.
Before I go any further I should preface this article by stating that I have never particularly been that keen on the term ‘Social Listening’. I find it a little misleading, even limiting of the growing power of online media monitoring and discussion analysis, which in essence scours the entire internet (not just social networks), pulling in mentions on a global scale. But for the lack for a better alternative and for simplicity’s sake, I’ll kowtow to the norm.
So what is Social Listening? Well for the uninitiated I offer my textbook explanation as thus:
Using specifically designed software (or online tools) a trained ‘listener’ searches the public internet sphere for mentions of particular keywords or images posted over a specific period of time. Think of it like the Ctl+F function you can try right now on this page, but instead of searching just one document for a specific keyword, the listening tools allow you to search all publically available documents, globally – including Twitter posts, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, news articles and their comment sections, etc.
I put emphasis on the word public as like all technologies there are limitations. Social Listeners don’t have the power to eavesdrop on our private online conversations (thankfully), those being keyword mentions that occur under a tinfoil blanket of privacy settings, like private Facebook posts for example. To do so would be akin to tapping someone’s phone and in most developed countries I’m pretty sure is against the law… I hope.
Besides, from a market research perspective this limitation has minimal implications, as any mentions amongst a private or narrow-cast group have, by definition, little bearing on public influence or conversation (outside of the posters immediate friendship group). Not to mention that anonymised quadrants of much of this private data (and more) is actually available for marketers, albeit at a cost, through a number of third party aggregators.
So why are brands Social Listening? Well surprisingly the core purpose is really not that dissimilar to the traditional methods of market research that have been around for decades. Think of the focus group example I mentioned earlier, though this information is more expansive and most importantly unprompted. Like dipping into a pensive pool of broader public consciousness on any topic that we, as social beings, feel like talking about.
And trust me we talk a lot. And we are talking more and more.
Some of the top social listening tools capture hundreds of millions of conversations daily, and about more topics than you could genuinely imagine. More importantly, from a market research perspective, we love to talk/praise/whinge about brands, products, campaigns, not to mention competitors. Suffice to say it is an exceptionally valuable data set that can longer be overlooked.
Social listening also provides brands with high-level appreciations on the overall sentiment of their consumers. It’s not about engagement here folks, it’s about feelings. A truly higher level of analysis. Illuminating how individuals feel about your brand at all points of the product cycle, and in real-time. Envisage debuting a campaign across any channel and monitoring immediate positive and negative reactions, themes of discussion etc., ‘enabling truly agile marketing’.
Ed Sullivan, former senior executive of Salesforce’s Radian6, observed recently that ‘a brand today is the sum of all the customer conversations happening about it. Customers own your brand: what they tell other customers about your company defines your brand. It makes sense to have a glass to the wall, so to speak’.
Media agencies in particular are being forced to intellectually arm-up in the face of this deluge of knowledge as they are perfectly placed to offer strategic insight from the data attained from Social Listening. As it’s not always what people are saying that has value, but who is saying it. And even just knowing which platform they are saying it on that quite tangibly inspire channel planning selections or inform demographics targeting and so on.
Truly, the advent of social listening has fundamentally changed what an agency can deliver for their clients, and of course it’s still changing, and for the better.
At this point it seems necessary for me to reluctantly pour some metaphorical cold water on my faintly biased fervour, by reminding us all that online discussion is just one avenue of consumer interaction. More importantly it is worth noting that individuals that post their thoughts and feelings online don’t provide by any means the complete picture of your audience.
It doesn’t mean that the people talking about your brand online aren’t in many cases highly influential (hence the rise of the Social Influencer). What it does mean is that if a brand is using just one avenue of research to guide their marketing strategies on or offline, then they face a very real danger of misinterpreting their consumer base.
Even more important to note, is that the purchase journeys and experiences from the more vocal members of your customers online can be significantly different from that of your core consumer demographic. This of course highlights the importance of, just like in undertaking any research, garnering information from a variety of sources before forming a hypothesis.
In the media agency world this is leading to the almost omnipotent concept of synergising the myriad of data sets we have at hand into clear, encompassing insights for our clients. For example: social listening data, social analytics, and conversion metric data, three very powerful data sets that, when combined, can paint a very broad picture of consumer trajectory right through a brands social landscape, from consideration to after-purchase advocacy.
Now, stepping out of that metaphorical cold shower, I can comfortably say that the benefits of Social Listening are hardly conjectural. At the very least it can help strategists qualify or discount their hunches with corroborating consumer statements. And at its very best, Social Listening can illuminate many unknown facets of the consumer experience.
Towards the end of last year, in the advent of an imminent Star Wars marketing inundation, I wrote about the various advantages and implications Social Listening has had across Hollywood over the last few years. Influencing everything from providing box office estimates from pre-launch social buzz right down to influence over casting decisions, and even informing the script writing process itself! I mean really, why not listen to your fans? And more recently, on this side of the Pacific, a couple of notable auto brands have employed Social Listening in the actual product development of newly released models, gleaning desires and pooling vehicle part recommendations to conciliate their die-hard loyalists, that in many cases are driving the engine rooms of their brands online word-of-mouth juggernauts.
Ultimately Social Listening, even from a top-line perspective can provide an edge over the competition. At its most powerful, by reviewing public sentiment so sweepingly and from such an all-encompassing height, it can sometimes be possible (for the truly anthropological of Social Listeners) to not just gauge expansive public consciousness on a topic, but to predict social trajectory; to recognise signs of burgeoning disapproval or infatuation before they bubble up into virality. And with the very real human need for us to share knowledge, experiences, and our ever-so-vibrant feelings amongst each other more and more, the perpetual focus group is really not so much of a fantasy anymore.
By OMD Melbourne social insights executive, Nic Murray