The title of this post might sound like it’s from a Dale Carnegie book. And sure it makes all the sense to listen well, in life. But here, I refer to the concept of listening in to the Social Media buzz. And the ample opportunity that it provides, to any brand, any company, any individual, today.

In our presentation (our own Social Media 101), we emphasize that the first opportunity for businesses on Social Media, is the opportunity to “listen”. It is an opportunity akin to eavesdropping the homes of your consumers, legitimately too

Listening enables you to get insights about your brand that you may not be aware of.

Listening can give you new product ideas, as you hear about the consumer’s wish list.

And many benefits of the kind.

And yet, as we speak about this, at events and to prospects, we have been asked questions like:

“Is it really worth it?”

“What do we do after listening?”

“Will it not be just too much conversation to manage and digest?”

“Are there such conversations happening, really?”

And after voicing such doubts, marketers return back to look at their advertising budgets, and decide to spend some more, just to make up for their diminishing returns on the earlier budgets! The low-resistance option. The option where you can buy yourself one month, or maybe three, to figure out why sales are down.

While all the time, the reality is there in front of the eyes, but the choice is made to ignore the reality, as it might just demand a lot more work.

Like a lot more analysis. “Those four conversations that were extremely negative about the product quality – how do they extrapolate to the larger quality challenge?” for example.

Or to figure out the real impact of a tweet recommending a competing product, from someone who has 5000 followers. What is the real “reach” of that message, and can it cause damage to your market share??

Say you find a thread of a complaint against one of your salesperson at one of your outlets. Do you ignore it and wish it will disappear or be forgotten? Or is it a PR crisis about to blow in your face?

All of these are tough questions, really. And there are many more of the kind.

It is easier to get them off your mind, and sit with your Excel spreadsheets, and figure out more media buy and more budget allocations. And hope that, in doing all of that, there is salvation. And a recovery of sales and of market share.

The fact is that you cannot wish away reality.

That the game is changing. And changing rapidly.

Increasing amount of purchase decisions – be they products or services, be they B2B or B2C – are being influenced, if not actually being made, via Social Media.

“Which phone should I buy?”, “Can you recommend me a good lawyer?”, “What’s your opinion of brand xyz?”, etc. are questions that you see all day long on Social Media.

Likewise, it just needs a few tweets or a particularly critical blog post, or a ‘caught in action’ video to pull a brand reputation down. One which had been built at great cost and one which will take even more cost to recover!

There IS real virtue in listening. Listening to the Social Media buzz. Listening to conversations about your brand, your company, your vertical, your competition.

Yes, these will take effort. To go over. To classify. To figure out the genuine from the junk. It will need time to understand the game, to come up with methods and strategies for this new reality. But you need to start somewhere. And the more you put off that start, the more difficult it will get to catch up.

To answer a simple question that someone asked us, “do such conversations happen, really?”. Okay – what kind of conversation can you expect to see on social media?

Those kind that you’d have with a friend over a drink.

Those issues that you discuss at a Parents-Teachers meeting.

The watercooler ones.

The chat that you have with your golfing mate, as you walk on them greens.

That chatter that is typical at a party, or at a dinner with friends.

The calls that you make to seek advice – on anything!

In short, any conversation that was natural to do offline, will now find its way on to the Social Media space. So go figure! Does your brand get discussed offline at all? Then, you can be sure to find such conversations on the social media space.

And then you can find some more.

“Because in my offline network, I might have not had the necessary expertise for say, those exclusive, high-end speakers that I was considering to purchase, or that piece of European art that fascinated me, or about a particular University in Ottawa that my child was planning to go to.”

Where the offline network stops, the online one is still accessible and alive.

And then to answer the other questions, “Will there not be too much data? How do I find it? How do I manage 1000s of conversations that come up?”

Well, this is where tools and service providers come to help.

Take for example, the SM2 Techrigy social media monitoring tool. Available in a Freemium model, it is something that you can immediately experiment with, and it can give you interesting insights in next to no time. Put in a set of keywords / phrases, tweak it with some conditions (language, geography etc.), and it starts pushing back to you, conversations from blogs, message boards, forums, video sites, social networking sites, twitter, etc. etc. that match your conditional requirements.

AND it does more. It gives you a basic sentiment track on all the conversations, it identifies the ‘influencers’ from the set of conversations, it enables an actionable workflow where you can assign the conversation to a team member. And many other such interesting features.

And in case you do not have internal team resources to manage this, or you want a higher level of value addition, there are service providers who can offer you that. In fact, our company provides services of the kind, where we do a manual read of all the conversations, do a more accurate sentiment tagging, and further tag the conversations around your areas of focus, such as quality issues, price issues, competition, product features, etc. That way, when you see a report, it is immediately actionable, no matter the quantity of posts that have been generated around your brand.

A few case studies of such social media monitoring work have been showcased earlier, on this blog.

In conclusion, I must share a job post that thrilled me no end, earlier this week. Even as we have been working hard to convince clients about the benefits of “listening to the social media”, we were happy to see Kodak announce a position of Chief Listener! That is amazing foresight, and acceptance and understanding of the new ways of doing business.

Whether you appoint a Chief Listener or decide to outsource your listening effort, do make a beginning. You will not regret, I assure you!

So are you already there ‘listening away’? Or what are your views / plans on the same? Would love to hear from you.

Disclosure: Social PR Outsourcing Pvt. Ltd., the parent company of Social Wavelength, is an authorised reseller for the SM2 Techrigy tool, for India.

Executive Summary:

People ARE talking about your Brand on Social Media. This much you know. Should you be tracking the conversations and interactions? Can actionable insights be delivered to you by monitoring Social Media for your brand (and that of your competitors)? In order to answer these, and other questions, about tracking the activity of your brand on this new media, we conducted a monitoring exercise for Hybrid/Electric cars. What follows is a detailed report of the same.

Contents:

• The Idea
• The Methodology
• Our Findings
  • Relevant/Irrelevant Ratio
  • Competitor Comparison related insights
  • Ratio of Tone, within brand
  • Product Related, by Tone
  • Price Related, by Tone
  • Buying Stage/Lead Generation
• Conclusions drawn/Learning
• Notes/Appendices

The Idea:

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We have previously performed Social Media Monitoring exercises on the Indian Elections 2009 as well as on the Online Travel Sector in India. We now shifted our focus to the worldwide Hybrid Car market. Our aim was to see if it is possible to get insights about a market, by monitoring the Social Media buzz around the same.

The Methodology:

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1. We used the industry leading Social Media Monitoring tool SM2 by the people over at Techrigy for the first stage of the process, viz. Capturing the data from across Social Media.

2. Since the study was to be about Hybrid/Electric Cars (as against elections), we decided to query the vast space using some well known brand names in the Hybrid/Electric cars market.
3. We used the SM2 to retrieve results over a 4 day period (12^th June ‘09 to 15^th June 09). This period gave us a total of 2822 results. SM2 did a great job of first level Categorization of the results.
4. Then, our team of Social Media Analysts swung into action. Using SM2, we first created a set of categories, which we believed would deliver insights into the monitoring effort.
5. We then analyzed each result, individually, categorizing it as appropriate. Humans, understanding Humans, as we like to say. We then sliced and diced the results, to get some interesting insights.
6. What did we find? Over to the next section.

Our Findings:

Relevant/Irrelevant ratio: (Back To Top)

Even with a very specific query, a large number of results, which had no bearing on the subject were recovered. During the human cleanup phase, these were categorized as irrelevant (What was classified as irrelevant?). These irrelevant results, are not considered while drawing further insights.

Of the total volume of 2822 results, the number of irrelevant results is 1837, the remaining being relevant. In terms of percentage, 65% were irrelevant, whereas 35%, relevant.

Types on insights available:

Competitor Comparison Related: (Back To Top)

If two or more brands of Hybrid/Electric cars have been compared, we marked the result as ‘Competitor Comparison Related’, while also tagging the result according to the tone it uses for each of the companies being compared. 37 relevant results were marked as ‘Competitor Comparison Related’.

Example: Is the Prius too mighty to take down?: (this was marked as being Neutral for both Honda and Toyota, as well as Price Related).

Summary: Among the results tagged as ‘Competitor Comparison’, the recurring comparison was the one between the Toyota Prius (entering its 3rd generation) and the first generation Honda Insight. While the sales of the Insight are said to below expectations and the Prius sales have also fallen, among the two, the 3rd generation Prius emerges ahead of the Insight. Examples: (1, 2).

Ratio of tone, within brand: (Back To Top) 

A brand has some chatter about it. But within this chatter, how much is positive/negative/neutral? How does the percentage of positive/negative/neutral results for a brand stack up against the same percentage for another brand?

Tone For GM: 78% Neutral Mentions, 13% Positive Mentions, 8%Negative Mentions

Summary: The Negative results for GM followed the announcement that GM canceled most of its Hybrid lineup, including the Malibu Hybrid 2010. Largely, the positive results were those which spoke the upcoming Buick having a Hybrid Powertrain.

Tone For Toyota: 78% Neutral Mentions, 19% Positive Mentions, 2%Negative Mentions

Summary: Negative results for Toyota came in the form of Tesla motors CEO saying that the Prius is not a true hybrid. Other negative results were about the Prius not being able to cross the 50 MPG average of fuel efficiency. Positive results for Toyota came from talk around the Prius, which people seem to be happy about, as well as reviews of the Toyota Civic hybrid.

Tone For Ford: 72% Neutral Mentions, 26% Positive Mentions, <1%Negative Mentions

Summary: The one negative result about Ford concerns how Toyota is beating Ford and GM, by employing lean business practices, allowing them to come up with innovate faster and cheaper as in the     case of the Prius. The largest number of positive results for Ford were around Senator McCain planning to buy a Ford Fusion Hybrid.

Product Related, by tone: (Back To Top)

When someone is talking about the features of your product (in this case, a Hybrid car), what tone does she use?

Take Toyota, for example. If a brand manager at Toyota wanted to find out, if someone has spoken on Social Media about the brand using a negative tone, this can be done. We can see all results with a negative tone, about its product (viz. The car itself, as against price, availability etc.). The following result matches the criteria:

Why is the Toyota Prius such a bore:

This result is ideal for posting a response to, and could have been escalated to the relevant department.

Summary: By far, the largest number of results for all brands are Product related. The Product related category is where correct Categorization can yield great results, as seen in the above example. The topics being discussed are by and large:

• People discussing news and events related to the brands (1, 2)
• Features of existing Products (1, 2)
• Upcoming releases (1, 2)

Price Related, by tone: (Back To Top)

39 results have been Categorized as ‘Price related’. Example: Honda Insight a Flop?

(This has been categorized into Honda: Tone Negative, Price Related)

Summary: Most price related results were about the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight. The Honda Insight is priced at $2000 less than the Prius, and in response, Toyota has slashed the price of its car by $1000. Despite the lower cost, the Honda Insight is likely to miss its sales target.

Buying Stage/Lead Generation: (Back To Top)

As we saw in the case of travel websites, listening to Social Media can be used as a method of lead generation as well.

An example of a result Categorized as ‘Buying: Early Stage’:

Summary: In the Buying Stage: Early category, people spoke about cars which they were considering as possible purchases. In the Buying Stage: Late category, most of the noise was around Senator McCain’s decision to buy a Ford Fusion.

Conclusions Drawn/Learning:

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About the Hybrid Cars Market, and related chatter on Social Media:

1. In terms of Social Media Volume the largest brands are Toyota, GM, Ford and Honda
2. The most discussed cars are Prius, Insight, Fusion and Civic
3. Smaller brands are also being spoken about on Social Media, with much lower volume.
4. The most discussed topics surrounding these brands and cars are the products themselves (features etc.), upcoming releases, price related issues, comparisons and news related to the brands/cars. There was also discussion related to the fact that despite the 24 hour production schedule of Toyota, there still exists a waiting period for the Prius.

About the Social Media Monitoring Exercise:

1. For any Brand/Company interested in knowing about the Social Media chatter surrounding them, this kind of a Social Media Monitoring exercise can deliver great value as well as actionable insights.

2. Such an exercise entails

• A Social Media monitoring tool, which can extract relevant data from across Social Media properties, based on the query that is set up.
• Setting up a Query, in such a manner that all possible relevant results are captured, while at the same time minimizing the incidence of irrelevant results being caught.
• Setting up of appropriate categories which will allow for better analysis of the data gathered. Both the above (query and category set up) are iterative in nature, with ongoing tweaking required.
• Beyond this, a layer of human intervention is absolutely necessary. The results retrieved by the tool need to be cleaned, by humans.
• To these cleaned results, appropriate rigorous categorization of the results must be done.These Categorized-by-Humans results can then be sliced and diced to derive actionable insights.

Your questions/comments are invited, of course.

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Notes and Appendices:

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NOTE: The above report is an analysis of the Social Media buzz around the subject of Hybrid Vehicles. None of the above statements represent any personal views of ours, on the subject.

NOTE: The numbers mentioned above, say for GM, are only of those results in which the brand name ‘GM’ (or ‘General Motors’ and its variations thereof) was mentioned. The same is the case with the other results as well.

What was classified as irrelevant? (Back To Top)

Two kinds of results were classified as irrelevant:

1. Results which were not related to Hybrid/Electric Cars: Many results talk about the different brands mentioned in the query and use the words ‘Hybrid’ and ‘Electric’ in a context other than the one relevant to the search. Example.

2. Results related to Hybrid/Electric Cars, which are irrelevant to people interested in monitoring the brand: Some results like link farms (blogs with only links pointing to other pages), many wiki talk pages (where the brand/product reference is not edited). Example.

[Edits: Tweaked the Title and the above notes]

[Edits 2: Changed graph style, formatting, added menu]

If you wish to download the White Paper for this study (PDF), you can visit the Resources Page on our website.