This report provides an evidenced-based review on how personal identities are changing and what this means for policy makers and Government. As market researchers, the report also contains some interesting ideas on how we should think about and study human behaviour.

It highlights a number of emerging trends which have implications for Market Research:

One observation in particular stood out:

“…the internet has not produced a new kind of identity. Rather, it has been instrumental in raising awareness that identities are more multiple, culturally contingent and contextual than had previously been understood.”

What does this mean for market research?

The rise of online social networks is creating new patterns in human behaviour, but also new opportunities in how to observe it. Open social networks provide researchers with an ever-growing body of data from which to observe and learn about human behaviour.

“One of the most significant observations of the impact of online identities is the way that some people can feel that they have achieved their ‘true’ identity for first time online. For example, some people may socialise more successfully and express themselves more freely online. This is one of the ways in which online identities can transform offline identities.”

This finding shows us how identities are becoming more complex and are increasingly being realised online and offline. As a result we need to integrate what we can learn by observing what happens online with more traditional forms of research. Social media research is one technique for doing so. It looks at what, where and how people talk online to help understand people better. By analysing large data sets of online communication it can help researchers understand what happens when people come together in these communities of interest.

About us

Listen and Learn Research is a specialist Social Media Research agency. We help organisations listen and learn from the thousands of conversations that take place every day online.

Related articles

• Web ‘re-defining’ human identity – report
• Opinion: No social media identity? Be very afraid
• Elderly people ‘disfranchised by social networking’

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Twitter

The big one. A micro-blogging platform where you’re limited to 140 characters. Most commonly used to update followers on what’s occurring to share links to other web content. Tends to be visceral, emotional and immediate.

Uses in research: good for gauging immediate impact to an event and to see how ideas spread.

Blogs

Online articles written by people (like us) who want to share their thoughts or opinions on whatever takes their interest (for example a US firm Indium has 73 different blog posts on soldering). Blogs can take a while to write as each one tends to tell a story, or convey an opinion or experience (e.g. beauty tips, travel experience, B2B marketing advice).

They tend to be considered, content rich insights and will often contain links to other, related content. They provide an increasingly useful source of information and advice.

Uses in research: as they tend to be quite detailed blogs can provide a detailed view of someone’s opinion and the argument behind their opinion. If comments are present you can see how people have responded and see how the discussion develops.

Forums

Forums have been around for ages and what they lack in beauty they make up for in the ease in which topics can be created, commented on and discussions created between disparate individuals.

Uses in research: data from forums can contain useful insights into a huge variety of topics. There tends to be less content in the beginning than a blog but if the discussion takes off they can become lengthy. Subsequent comments allow you to see how the discussion evolved and opinions formed.

Customer reviews

Many retail and travel sites now let you (and often go out of their way to ask you) to leave your opinions about what you’ve experienced. This tends to combine both a rating (e.g. 5 stars) with an open response area where you can share your thoughts. These areas can turn into a discussion where people disagree or build on the experiences of others.

Uses in research: reviews can provide very detailed, time sensitive information about a person’s experience with a product or service. When ratings offer little difference (e.g. both products rate at 4.5 on the ‘Star scale’, the comments can help inform consumer choices

Comments
This is more of a sub-category of the others rather than a source in its own right. Usually at the owners discretion social media platforms allow visitors to comment on what they’ve seen.

Uses in research: these comments add further detail and richness to what’s being discusses which is provides different perspectives for any analysis.

About us

Listen & Learn Research is a specialist social media research agency. We create and communicate new insights based on the natural conversations taking place every day online.

Related articles

• Social Media A-Z: A Glossary for 2013

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Moments of truth

Up until now, leading brands have been the ones who consistently win at two ‘moments of truth’ for their consumers:

Google argue that the ability to create and share your own content about brands has given birth to a new moment, the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT). Consumers can now discover a great deal about you before making a purchase; without going anywhere near your marketing or sales. Their research found that people now look at over 10 different sources of online information before making a purchase.

What does this mean? It means that as marketers we need to understand how to win at ZMOT.

A new way of buying

Stop for a moment, and think about the last time you bought something new. Does this sound familiar?

Thanks to free Wifi this can happen anywhere. In the aisle of a store choosing a new radio, in the shop price checking or on the bus searching for ideas for tonight’s dinner.

Jim Lecinski, Google

Why would people make decisions based on the opinions of strangers? They don’t. They make decisions based on the opinions of people like themselves. Which is who they find at ZMOT.

So how do you win at the Zero Moment of Truth?

You can do what Google suggest and use tools to see what people are searching for. This is a good start but only goes so far. You need to understand exactly what people find when they look for you and develop your strategy accordingly.

Start with getting a good idea of what they see:

When you can see what they see, you can then:

In short, you can start actively competing at ZMOT instead of letting it happen without you.

Related articles

• The Future of Marketing: Winning the Zero Moment of Truth
• The Convergence of Search and Social – Part 1
• The Future of Marketing: ZMOT
• Consumers Take a Multi-Device Path to Purchase

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Just what we need, another buzz word…

That said, we think it’s time to start a conversation about Big Qual. We’ve got a hunch that with the right people, the right tools, a good way of working and some creativity we can knock down the barriers currently in the way of using huge amounts of natural speech in research.

So, what’s Big Qual?

To us it seems that qual has become synonymous with small, personal and in-depth. We think it’s time to challenge the bit that says; small.

We see Big Qual as an important, and as yet, not much talked about aspect of Big Data. So maybe we should start by asking what Big Data is:

“…big data is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools” Wikipedia

We think this difficulty happens a lot sooner in traditional qualitative research projects. In fact the methodology has become, in part, defined by a limited scope imposed by the problems of managing large amounts of unstructured conversational data.

Continuing to accept these limitations starves us of a hugely valuable source of insight into how people behave and think. We’d like to expand the discussion of Big Data to include how these new tools and techniques can be used imaginatively to help us tame Big Qual. Our goal is to help people make cognitive leaps and develop real insights from truly mass observation of human behaviour.

Where do we start?

We know this is a big question, certainly one that’s bigger than us. It’s a challenge which needs to be discussed and worked on across a number of different disciplines.

Here are some of the challenges we’re thinking about to get the ball rolling:

The Big Qual Social Club

The Big Qual Social Club is something we’ve started to help get the discussion going. It’s a place to come and help shape a future of Big Qual research. It’s for anyone who thinks hearing lots and lots of consumers talk in their own words might be useful.

If this sounds good to you, head on over to the Big Qual Social Club group on LinkedIn and apply to join.

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And the winners are…

Following on from the community’s intense activity on the E.ON Innovation website, we’ve been hard at work reviewing all the ideas, to see which were most popular, and which could be turned into real new products and services. From over 1600 submitted ideas, we arrived at the final 5 concepts built by the E.ON Innovation team from the original ideas, comments and community discussion.

Last Tuesday, the E.ON Team walked into the E.ON Innovation Dragon’s Den and pitched the final ideas to the Leadership Team, explaining why customers would want them, how they would work, backed up with market size and financial forecasts to answer those challenging questions that we all know and love from the show.

The E.ON Team left the room, to let the judges deliberate, and pick a winner. Following a lengthy and impassioned debate, one idea was selected and unanimously agreed. But first, our runners up…
Runners up

We have 4 runners up, and each of them will receive £2,000 home energy makeovers. And they are:

Dick Taplin “Match electrical consumption to generation”

Dick’s idea was to make best use of domestic electricity generation sources (like solar panels) by timing the use of some appliances to peak periods of generation.

Pea Brain ”The self healing house”

Pea Brain (real name, Paul) suggested that our homes could diagnose developing problems based on historical data, and then take steps to do something about it, from sending us a notification, to calling the repair man.

Colin Moull “Don’t reinvent the wheel”

Colin had the simple but brilliant idea of using online gaming to get people engaged in saving energy, through popular games like Farmville.

Bex “Eco kitchen starter set”

Bex wanted E.ON to produce a range of co-ordinating kitchen appliances that would each make use of the best environmentally-friendly technology, from a toaster to a kettle, a washing machine to a composting bin.

Overall Grand Prize winner

We can only have one overall winner, who will receive our grand prize: a £10,000 home energy makeover
Steve McNair “Eon Care Sense – Technology Helps The Aged and Vulnerable”

Steve saw a role for E.ON in helping us all care for ageing or vulnerable people in their own homes. Smart sensors could detect unusual patterns of energy use, that might suggest a problem, and alert family members or care workers.

What happens next

All the winning ideas will go on into research and development in E.ON, with the aim of bringing the products and services to market within 3 years.

The E.ON Innovation community website is now closed, but we’re still keen to work with the community, so watch this space for news of further challenges or opportunities to be involved in creating the next generation of energy-saving services.

It only remains for us to say congratulations to all our winners, and thank you once again, from everyone here on the team, for all the work and energy you’ve put into the community. We’ve met some fascinating people, had eye-opening conversations and seen some truly exciting glimpses of the future. Thank you

Originally posted at:
www.eon-innovation.com/blog/2012/06/and-the-winners-are/

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Social media monitoring as a technique has evolved to become almost totally marketing-centric, but this misses a trick.

While dashboards provide great real-time information, they can struggle to help you really learn about your consumers.

Going back to basics for a moment, we can boil social media down into four parts:

• Creation – your consumers creating, sharing, commenting and publishing their own content.
• Listening – how you access this stream of conversation.
• Learning – your ability to create and share insights about your consumers and markets.
• Interacting – acting on this knowledge, influencing the conversation and engaging directly with consumers.

As an industry we’ve come a long way in terms listening and interacting, but there’s still room for improving how and what we can learn from what consumers say. At the moment we seem stuck at measuring what can be measured (keywords, reach, sentiment etc.) at the expense of trying to really learn what consumers think.

Here’s a quick test you can do to see if you’re really learning or simply counting:

Q: Has your approach to social media so far:

• Helped you understand how and why (not just if) consumers feel the way they do about you?
• Let you find answers to questions you didn’t know you had?
• Given you the evidence and insight to innovate, solve problems or be creative?
• Given you valuable insights to share with other departments?

Those with listening systems with outputs limited to just dashboards tend to answer ‘no’ to most of these questions.

However, it’s not a lack of desire that’s holding firms back, but rather a matter of having the right tools. Computers are great at sorting and counting, but still have a way to go to unpick the chaotic beauty of human communication.

The challenge seems to be how to make the most of these systems by combining human analysis with machine processing.

We’ve seen some evidence of firms using this hybrid model to great effect, but so far this approach tends to be light touch and focuses on observing trends in the outputs of dashboards, rather than going back to the raw data.

The problem here is one of scale, how can you practically read thousands of comments and learn from your observations?

There are some recent developments that are starting to provide answers to this. These use some new techniques (such as out-tasking or crowdsourcing) that enable firms to use humans to read large amounts of information and help identify what’s important and interesting.

This then can be harnessed more easily to create genuine insights about how people think.

Our work for an engergy company shows how this can be put into action. As part of a recent innovation project they collected thousands of detailed comments about energy and how it fits into people’s lives and wanted to see what they could learn from it.

Sentiment and keyword analysis couldn’t provide them with the depth of insight needed, so we read and analysed the comments to understand what people were saying about energy, when they talked to each other.

From this they were able to learn more about what motivates people’s interest, what untapped needs they had and identify ‘hooks’ to help communicate more effectively with them.

The post Social data: stop just measuring and start learning appeared first on Listen & Learn Research.

Titled ‘Welcome to the Social Enterprise’, Salesforce delivered a compelling vision for how enterprises can deploy social tools to greatly improve collaboration and knowledge sharing between colleagues, customers and partners. Sales, Customer Services, HR, Marketing, cross-team collaboration; it all links.

The thing that really stuck with us was just how much rich, human, open information is being collected using these techniques. What better way to create real-life feedback on how well your systems and process are working than by examining how they are used in practice. Social Kaizen anyone?

Here are some of the presentations that we liked:

Burberry – and it’s use of Salesforce’s Chatter app to help internal collaboration

Kimberley Clark – who gave another example of using Chatter

Activision – who showed how they are using social CRM to deliver an enhanced customer support experience

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Put simply, he argues that to make the most out of social platforms business need to help people connect with each other, not just try to sell them stuff.

He argues that most companies’ social efforts can’t deliver because they don’t address the principle need that drives people’s use of these networks; to connect with each other. Simply mapping existing broadcast and feedback strategies into these spaces doesn’t meet this need, and indeed can seem shallow and intrusive.

His research suggests that businesses that win in this area adopt a strategy that:

“reduces [a firms] costs or increases customers’ willingness to pay, by helping people establish or strengthen relationships, if they do work on the company’s behalf”

This argument is particularly useful because it gives us a design framework and a set of tools to deploy when considering how to engage with people through online social channels. This seems more constructive than just counting Likes or trying to figure out what to do with sentiment scores.

The article goes on to suggest three tests to evaluate your potential strategies:

You can read the article in full here

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Q. So, why did Marketing claim social?

The ability for anyone to create and publish their own content, and to comment on others’ has resulted in an ever growing amount of data. This created three new challenges for organisations:

Collecting and dealing with all this data can be a daunting task and so technological solutions have emerged as the leading response. These typically include:

Our research found that these solutions deliver to their limits. They’re great at collecting and processing and are becoming better at applying meaning, but they consistently fail to deliver on the insight potential. And so, the usefulness of social media monitoring tends to be limited to providing social information (aka dashboards). This is works well for measuring quantifiable objectives such as overall awareness, mentions or buzz and fits well with tracking Marketing campaigns. However, it ignores the potential in using this data to create valuable consumer and market insights.

We think it’s time that social data went beyond just Marketing and found its place in the research mix, because when harnessed in the right way it can give you:

And these benefits are set to increase as user generated discussion becomes the norm and firms become even better at engaging consumers.

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