Social Media: More a Research/ Analytics than a Marketing Tool?

Read an article yesterday about increasing apathy amongst college goers on brands’ social media marketing efforts. Add to that another from the flip side of the coin – CMOs. According to a recent study, only 15% of U.S. CMOs have been able to quantitatively prove Social’s impact!

It kind of points towards an old felt-but-not-quite-articulated hypothesis I had! At the time, I used to think that I felt this way because my business was more focussed on the use of social media for a “learning” experience, not so much an “outreach” one. And this despite the fact that marketers we spoke to almost always were interested in the lower hanging fruit, i.e., the marketing using SM. So, when we went in with a pitch that said – “hey, this is what social media can teach you about your consumer or your competitor or your brand”, they would say, “hey, can you help us make our facebook page better”! Maybe it was compounded by the fact that the consumer insights/ market research people, those that would truly benefit from this, turned up their noses at this “unconventional, unstructured, “qualitative”‘ data source and took whatever we said with a pinch of, no! scratch that – huge dollops of salt! (See my very first blog post on this question of whether social media research is fish or fowl! )

So my hypothesis was just this – that Social’s FIRST and BIGGEST benefit was as a data source for higher consumer understanding. After all, this was/ is a medium that is changing the way people talk/ behave/ share/ opine – in many cases, this reflects people’s needs/ wants/ perceptions/ attitudes/ usages/ purchases. Most importantly, it is PEER to PEER. And proactive/ not reactive. Why then would you not leverage it for classical research questions? (Sure, it applies only to that percentage of the population that is connected, but, a) that is a large number in most countries now and b) even where it isn’t, it can be used as a proxy for the relevant categories.)

Ofcourse, I don’t think we should be ready to junk Social Media as a marketing tool yet – in fact, my hypothesis notwithstanding, I do think that the world is getting more digital – and therefore, marketers have no choice but to follow their consumers – i.e., go where the consumers go – in other words, social..

So then, what causes the CMO’s disenchantment with the medium? Maybe its the inadequate/ non standardised measurement/ metrics piece – obviously, if you aren’t convinced about how you are measuring input and output, you will not be convinced of the ROI of your spend. (See my older post on KPIs for Social Media Measurement for a way towards metrics and KPIs)

What is your take? Marketing or Research? (or measurement?)

(Credit: conversition.com)

Social Media Analytics – Fish or Fowl, Quali or Quanti, Believable or Just Jargon!

A few days ago, while having one on ones with some business analysts, i was flummoxed – nay dismayed, by a bright young man telling me – “so, i thought when i joined this company, that i would be working in analytics. All we do now is social media.”

It took me the better part of an hour to explain to him why what he did was truly analytics – even though it was social media analytics!

It did set me thinking though – a look at wiki definitions showed me – “Analytics is the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data”.

Now this was the gist of what i had told that young analyst. The fact that you are observing patterns and deriving key takeaways from a vast quantity of data means you are ANALYSING it, and therefore working on analytics. After all, while in social media, a lot of the challenge has to do with just the extraction and aggregation of data – comprehensively i might add, and this is where all tools like Radian6, Sysomos etc concentrate, a big part of the challenge is also what you do with this data – how do you then process (ANALYSE) it to derive the “so what”. Hence all the dashboards/ the buzz on “measurement” etc.

I think where the confusion lay in my young friend’s mind, and actually also lies at the heart of why purist market research people continue to scoff at Social Media analytics as a reasonable source of consumer insights, is highlighted when you read the next part of wiki’s definition: “Especially valuable in areas rich with recorded information, analytics relies on the simultaneous application of statistics, computer programming and operations research to quantify performance”. THIS was what my friend was talking about – most folks in social media analytics do NOT use advanced statistical models to derive the insights – they mainly use plain sums/ or averages – ie simple/ intuitive tools to do it. Having said that, THIS is also what we were trying to do – inject classical MR techniques in the analytics of unstructured data ie Social Media data.

Think about it – given technology’s weaknesses, we actually used a combination of people and tools – what we called a “bytes and brains” methodology  to derive the appropriate insights and nuances. (As a fallout, SocialMedia analytics actually combined the best of quantitative techniques and the qualitative insights as seen in focus groups and depth interviews). But the way to do it was via classical sampling techniques – and that which worked best was Stratified random sampling! Additionally, we used cluster analysis, factor analysis, multi dimensional scaling..what have u — to show patterns – and ofcourse to do this we used spss and sas — now, the problem was, that given the state of evolution of the medium and its apprecaition by the larger world, folks weren’t ready for it! Hence the regression (yess, pun intended!) to sums and means!

The point here is, therefore, Social Media analytics IS TRUE analytics – it definitely gives businesses an opportunity to mine and process data to answer critical business problems, it even has the ability to use the standard statistical models and methodologies to do so, it combines the best of quali and quant research…its just that the world is not ready for the full leveraging of this. It needs folks like us to educate and demonstrate to the world, the art of the possible.

Evangelists anyone????