Adam T. Sutton

Market Research via Social Media

April 17th, 2009

Consumers are expressing themselves in thousands of ways online, including in videos, images, forums, and blogs. The diary-like style of blogs can offer unique insight into a person’s life and opinions. And, since they’re written in text, blogs can be more easily aggregated and mined for insights than other media, such as video.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Janet Eden-Harris, VP of Web Intelligence, J.D. Power and Associates, on this topic. Eden-Harris works in a division of the market research firm that is responsible for mining social media for market insights. Information gathered this way can, at times, be more valuable than a survey, she says.

“People go to their blogs, to message boards, chat rooms, and forums, really, to talk to one another. And they talk spontaneously about products, services, and their lives… You’re not prejudicing them by asking a question. You are listening in, or overhearing conversations that are taking place spontaneously.”

Well-read bloggers also tend be very passionate and knowledgeable about a specific topic, she says. “These are the people that you very likely want to listen to most because they are more or less your thought leaders and opinion leaders.”

Eden-Harris and her team gather data from publicly available social media sites across the Web. They do not gather information from any sources that require a password, such as Facebook. Other social media sites, such as MySpace, do not always require a password. The team is not concerned with the gathering information about specific bloggers, she says. Instead, they are concerned with their topics and opinions.

“Essentially what we’re doing is collecting [this information] into a database, and we mine millions of posts every week and continually mine them,” she says. “It goes beyond demographics. It goes into what motivations do people have for buying or using a product or responding to a trend.”

Her team uses Natural Language Processing, a branch of computer science, to scan the posts for insights. NLP can be used to analyze text for subject matter, sentiment, and assumptions about a person’s background, such as sex and age. By scanning millions of posts, the team can uncover who is saying what about products and companies, and create reports.

Types of Reports

There are four main categories of information that companies ask J.D. Power to research that can involve mining social media, Eden-Harris says. They are:

1. Brand monitoring – This is the most common type. Marketers want to know what consumers are saying about their companies and their competitors. Marketers could survey their own customers, but it is much more difficult to survey their competitors’ customers themselves.

2. Trend analysis – Marketers also ask for analysis on the current trends in a market, and where the market is heading. It can be difficult to pick up on trends in surveys, but you can often pick up on them through blog and social media research, Eden-Harris says.

3. Customer information – Marketers also ask for more information about their current and potential customers. Blogs provide particular insight in this category since many consumers will identify themselves as a customer in one post, and talk about their personal lives in other posts. The posts can also provide information on the best language to use when communicating to customers.

4. Unmet needs – it is also possible to collect information about what products consumers wish they had. “Consumers are classically not particularly good at coming up with product innovations, but, boy, are we good at saying what annoys us and what we wish we had,” Eden-Harris says.

Adam T. Sutton

About Adam T. Sutton

Adam T. Sutton, Senior Reporter, MarketingSherpa
Adam generates content for MarketingSherpa's Email and Inbound Marketing newsletters. His years of experience in interviewing marketers and conveying their insights has spanned topics such as search marketing, social media marketing, ecommerce, email and more. Adam previously powered the content behind MarketingSherpa's Search and Consumer-marketing newsletters and carries that experience into his new role. Today, in addition to writing articles, he contributes content to the MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa blogs, as well as MECLABS webinars, workshops and summits.

Prior to joining MarketingSherpa, Adam was the Managing Editor at the Mequoda group. There he created content and promotions for the company's daily email newsletter and managed its schedule.

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  1. April 17th, 2009 at 18:57 | #1

    I completely disagree with the quote about how consumers are not good at product innovation. They may not know how to articulate a new innovation, but those complaints and wish lists are exactly what a proper market researcher should be probing and exploring. The complain/wish is not the end of what the consumer has to say, but the beginning.

  2. April 18th, 2009 at 09:11 | #2

    Hi Mike,

    You are absolutely right. I believe that Janet was inferring that complaints stem from unmet needs and they point to opportunities for innovation. I’m sorry for not making that more clear.

  3. April 20th, 2009 at 01:09 | #3

    “Marketers could survey their own customers, but it is much more difficult to survey their competitors’ customers themselves.”

    If a company knows enough to know who their competitors customers are (at least down to demographic pools) they can just as easily survey them as they would their own.

  4. April 29th, 2009 at 15:14 | #4

    While this is great you have to make sure you are not changing because of a small but vocal minority that uses social media to express themselves. The majority of the population does not blog or use MySpace. That said, it is a good way to begin to understand your customers needs and to find innovative ways to create new products.

  5. July 3rd, 2009 at 06:10 | #5

    I came to your blog just when I was surfing on this topic. I am happy that I found your blog and information I wanted.

  6. July 14th, 2009 at 07:45 | #6

    The best information i have found exactly here. Keep going Thank you

  7. RJAY
    October 26th, 2009 at 06:45 | #7

    The “types of report” are well explained. You really hit right on the target. I think there’s another important things concerning Market Research, that’s it–should be answer the question: Could your online surveys be better and yield more data? May I encourage our readers to check out this strategies at http://snurl.com/smartsurveys I know they can get more out of it.

    More power to and keep writing an excellent articles!

  8. October 29th, 2009 at 06:56 | #8

    This is a very good informative post.

  9. May 11th, 2010 at 23:41 | #9

    nice post, I have read many post of your blog. this was fulfill with many great information. but I completely disagree with the quote about how consumers are not good at product innovation. They may not know how to articulate a new innovation, but those complaints and wish lists are exactly what a proper market researcher should be probing and exploring.

  10. October 23rd, 2010 at 06:02 | #10

    very helpful article.
    Thanks,
    Albert.

  11. March 29th, 2011 at 15:09 | #11

    I assume when he says “Consumers are classically not particularly good at coming up with product innovations, but, boy, are we good at saying what annoys us and what we wish we had” he’s referring to a time before the general public were empowered by the vast knowledge of the internet. Consumers these are very good at helping companies innovate. If anyone is interested we just published article teaching you how to use Facebook’s new Question product to conduct market research using their Facebook brand page. http://whatworkswhere.com/index.php/2011/global/facebook-pages-how-to-use-them-for-free-market-research/

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