A bold statement of intent
Social insight should help you develop creative content that people can see themselves in.
What do we mean by this?
There’s more to social data than dashboards and quick dips. That’s enough to give a steer, but it’s really only scratching the surface. The money’s in what lies beneath.
If you’re looking for actual new insight to help drive creative development – it’s worth putting the time in. Dig deeper, you’re worth it.
Individual reflections, social patterns
We use social media to tell other people about what’s going on in our lives, how we’re feeling and what we’re thinking about.
Social data (the stuff your listening tool picks up) is full of these snippets of people’s lives and how other people react to them. Social Listening will show you footprints but it can’t tell you why people have trodden that path or why they’ve made the connections they have.
It’s when you look properly across thousands of these exchanges that you start to see patterns emerge in how people experience and feel about life. After all, there are only so many ways to experience the same thing.
This needs a qual driven approach – something that will help you pick out the different feelings and experiences, and help you interpret them properly.
The result is gold dust for creatives.
They can use social data to uncover the dominant responses to any aspect of life. For example, if you’re interested in talking to lonely people, it can help you see beyond the stereotypical model of the lonely old widow – to the different ways people experience loneliness and its causes.
This understanding can then be used to help build messaging and scenarios that speak to these dominant characteristics. Giving your creative the broadest appeal.
A creative strategy based on patterns in social behaviour will result in campaign assets that are more grounded in your audience’s reality – that know how to talk their talk. You’ll make it easier for people to see themselves in your work. It will be more recognisable, more familiar, more engaging.
Macmillan – Milestones
When Macmillan wanted to create a new fundraising proposition, they asked us to help them understand how people ask strangers for money.
By reading and assessing hundreds of people’s requests on ‘giving pages’ we were able to identify the different ways that they frame and position their requests. We boiled down the different contexts and linguistic styles to create a series of typologies, each with their own characteristics.
This showed Macmillan and its creative partner what the main methods behind the ‘ask’ were. Macmillan was then able to create a series of giving packages – each designed to appeal to a different audience type.
Getting to the potential
This is powerful stuff, but it takes a bit of work to get to. You can’t just pop a few keywords into your listening tool and skim the peaks looking for interesting conversations.
You need to read, reflect and analyse a load of data – get into the detail and work out what’s really going on. Then you need to pull it all back together to see where the patterns are, what they mean and where the creative potential is.
This is what we do. It’s more than listening, it’s social insight. Give us a shout if you’d like to find out more.