Social Wavelength is a full service Social Media Agency. Our solutions range from creation of long term strategy, custom application development, SMM, Presence Management, Community building and management and actual execution of Social Media initiatives. Currently, we serve clients from a large variety of industries including healthcare, electronics, media and many more. These clients are a mix of Indian and International entities, from one-person companies to large multinationals. I believe this mix of clients we are servicing gives us a unique perspective, when it comes to how different brands and companies can utilize Social Media. It helps us identify the variables which go into making Social Media initiatives successful, as well as the constants.
We thought it’d be great to share some of our observations here. Learning from the trenches, as it were.
Fundamentals are fundamentally important
Was that a profound statement or what?! But seriously, this is the real world. Results have to be real as well. Not an inventory of things you did, but a checklist of things you achieved.
Listening is way more important that it is made out to be
Whether by using basic Twitter search, Google Blogsearch, Oneriot etc. or with Radian 6, Techrigy SM2 (Full Disclosure: Social Wavelength is a Techrigy SM2 Reseller), listening is the most important activity you can invest your time in, at all stages of your initiatives.
Buy In
Going with today’s theme of making profound statements I’d like to say, that Client buy in is very important. Buy in into your agency, you, your portfolio. The more of this there is, the easier it is for you to suggest and implement innovative strategies.
Integrate
If you think about it (not even too hard) its obvious that an integrated approach is the only thing which makes sense. Why is it, then, that we see so many social media activities oblivious of their counterparts in the so called ‘mainstream’ media? A non integrated campaign is merely an experiment, a dabbling. When Social Media initiatives are integrated with the overall marketing strategy, you achieve, well, Resonance.
There is huge room for innovation, loads of untapped potential
How many ‘Remarkable’ Social Media campaigns do you recall? Things which made you say, “I love the way they’ve used Social Media” or “Damn! That’s audacious”. Not nearly enough!
So there you have it. Just some things we picked up on the job over the last few months. There is lots more, of course, but we’d like to hear from you. What are your thoughts? What is your learning from the trenches?
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.
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.
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.
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.
We used the SM2 to retrieve results over a 4 day period (12th June ‘09 to 15th June 09). This period gave us a total of 2822 results. SM2 did a great job of first level Categorization of the results.
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.
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.
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.
Ratio of Relevant to Irrelevant Results
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.
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’.
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).
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
Ratio of tones for GM
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
Ratio of tone for Toyota
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
Ratio of tone for Ford
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.
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:
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)
(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.
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.
About the Hybrid Cars Market, and related chatter on Social Media:
In terms of Social Media Volume the largest brands are Toyota, GM, Ford and Honda
The most discussed cars are Prius, Insight, Fusion and Civic
Smaller brands are also being spoken about on Social Media, with much lower volume.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Two kinds of results were classified as irrelevant:
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.
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.
A lot of activity on the Wikipedia Profiles of LK Advani, Narendra Modi and Varun Gandhi was picked up. While Narendra Modi was being touted as the next Prime Ministerial candidate from the BJP, criticism about him seems to have increased during Phase 2. Similarly, as the posts below show, many people are critical about LK Advani as their leader during this phase.
bjp or advani or bhartiya janta party or bharatiya… (ID 448547) Published date: 5/7/2009 http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1253791 Nitish Kumar disapproves of Narendra Modi as future PM
Nitish Kumar disapproves of Narendra Modi as future PM
bjp or advani or bhartiya janta party or bharatiya… (ID 448595) Published date: 5/10/2009 http://twitter.com/issuecrazy/statuses/1755120462 Advani not behind Vajpayee during Kandahar crisis: Rahul: Roorkie, May 10: Lashing out at BJP leader LK Advani, .. http://bit.ly/19TBNy
Advani not behind Vajpayee during Kandahar crisis: Rahul: Roorkie, May 10: Lashing out at BJP leader…
bjp or advani or bhartiya janta party or bharatiya… (ID 448605) Published date: 4/16/2009 http://twitter.com/palinn/statuses/1532257872 Any reason known yet why the chappal was thrown at Advani today? #advani #india
Any reason known yet why the chappal was thrown at Advani today? #advani #india
bjp or advani or bhartiya janta party or bharatiya… (ID 448763) Published date: 4/26/2009 http://twitter.com/rahuljrark/statuses/1620270573 @annkur Narendra Modi has been using nets in front of him to prevent the shoe attacks
@annkur Narendra Modi has been using nets in front of him to prevent the shoe attacks
Popularity (10 of 10):
bjp or advani or bhartiya janta party or bharatiya… (ID 448801) Published date: 5/3/2009 http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1252704 Maya takes a leaf out of Advani’s bash-Cong book
Maya takes a leaf out of Advani’s bash-Cong book
Popularity (10 of 10):
bjp or advani or bhartiya janta party or bharatiya… (ID 448802) Published date: 4/28/2009 http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1251295 Cong candidate is fuelling fury against Advani
Cong candidate is fuelling fury against Advani
BJP is portrayed as the only party which can effectively combat terrorism, especially on videos. Many posts claim that BJP anticipated emerging as the single largest party with 162-165 seats minimum and a maximum of 185-189 seats.
While Narendra Modi is reported to have call the Congress party a private limited party of Sonia Gandhi, a large number of posts on Social Media echo that Modi practices a politics of hatred. Similar thoughts are also put forward about Varun Gandhi.
bjp or advani or bhartiya janta party or bharatiya… (ID 379629) Published date: 3/2/2009 http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1235579 Narendra Modi raps Pawar for ‘insulting’ Mahatma Gandhi
Narendra Modi raps Pawar for ‘insulting’ Mahatma Gandhi
bjp or advani or bhartiya janta party or bharatiya… (ID 379650) Published date: 3/2/2009 http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1235647 Manohar Joshi attacks Narendra Modi…
Manohar Joshi attacks Narendra Modi…
bjp or advani or bhartiya janta party or bharatiya… (ID 379695) Published date: 4/6/2009 http://in.blogial.com/2009/04/07/why-you-should-click-on-advanis-ads Why you should click on Advani’s ads?
If you had done atleast a single google search or visited one site with google’s adsense in the rece…
Here, we see the various themes as well as how they related to each other. Size of circle denotes frequency of mention and distance of two circles from one another denotes how closely they were related. Closer the circles, more often were those themes talked about together.
These are the basic themes which were touched upon when the topic Indian Elections was spoken about during phase 2. The size of each theme/word denotes how often it was spoken about.
I’d like to say, that Client buy in is very important. Buy in into your agency, you, your portfolio. The more of this there is, the easier it is for you to suggest and implement innovative strategies.
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