Social Listening And Online Communities: 1+1=3?

By Michalis Michael

Two out of the top 3 trends in market research repeatedly reported by Greenbook’s GRIT report are social listening and online communities. The third is mobile research which, being a method of collecting data for surveys, can be part of online communities anyway.

We have written about private online communities and social media listening separately many times before, but this blog post is dedicated to the power of integrating the two disciplines.

Back in February, the CEO of Kantar Research Eric Salama spoke at the Insight Innovation Exchange conference in Amsterdam, about his view of the future of market research. One of the concepts that stuck with me was that in the future, market research will be divided in “learning applications” and “action applications”. My interpretation of these two types of apps is that the former is pure market research as we know it, and the latter are adjacent marketing activities that today are not governed by the ESOMAR or the MRS code of conduct. Examples of action applications are programmatic advertising, customer advocacy, and agile customer engagement.

Two of the following three ways to integrate social listening and online community platforms are action applications, and one is a learning application. Let’s see if you agree that 1+1 will equal more than 2 in these three cases:

1. Member recruitment for online communities
   For the first time in the history of marketing and market research, we can now find respondents for ad-hoc research or members of communities based on their perceptions, without having to use a screener questionnaire. We can use social listening to gather all the posts from the web that: are aligned with an idea, agree with a concept or express love for a brand. Because the expressed opinions on social media posts are unsolicited, they are of better quality than those expressed in a screener questionnaire used with people from a consumer panel. The panelists have an interest to figure out how to answer “right” so that they will be invited to participate in a survey (expert respondents).
2. Listen-probe-listen-probe
   A virtuous circle can be created by integrating listening and communities. A brand or organisation can first “listen” to what people say on the web about the subjects of interest, and then engage with the members of their private online communities to ask questions (probe) about what they learnt from the harvesting and analysis of online posts. Through the probing they are bound to discover information that will improve the way they do their social media monitoring. And so on and so forth… Every time they complete a listen-probe-listen cycle, new valuable insights can be extracted that were never attainable before.
3. Amplified customer advocacy
   Product category influencers can be identified through the content of their online posts and the size of their networks. They can then be invited to join an exclusive private online community for co-creation of digital content and customer advocacy amplification i.e. the sharing of the digital content with their friends and network.

Connecting the dots is a very powerful notion in market research. As shared on this blog several times, we firmly believe that a true business insight is more likely to be the result of synthesizing data from multiple sources as opposed to analysing a (small) data-set to death. The insights expert is a necessary part of this equation (1+1=3). There is also a new breed of a human skill-set that is becoming more and more an integral part of those market research agencies that “get it”; it is the data scientist who is among other things a machine learning specialist not daunted by tera-, peta-, hexa or zeta-bytes.

Thoughts?