Social Media | Research Access

The Future of Market Research

December 15, 2011 By Dana Stanley 4 Comments

As anticipated, it was a fascinating and thought-provoking discussion yesterday in the Market Research Trends 2012 webinar. There were over 40 people in attendance live, and there were many interesting questions submitted by the audience.

The discussion featured Lenny Murphy, editor of the GreenBook Blog, and Romi Mahajan, CMO of Metavana (Vivek Bhaskaran, CEO of Survey Analytics was not able to attend at the last minute). The discussion was ably moderated by Ivana Taylor of DIY Marketers.

If you weren’t able to make the webinar, here’s just a sampling of what you missed:

Gamification

Lenny said gamification is a challenge to the way market researchers currently think but that companies out the space are successfully employing game principles to their industries. Romi said it’s possible to do gamification very well or very badly. Using a sweepstakes as an incentive to participate in a survey panel is an example of gamification done poorly.

Consumerization

Romi described consumerization as the tail wagging the dog. Instead of companies mandating how their employees or customers will behave, now the process has been inverted, and the customers hold the power. Lenny said consumers increasingly own their own data and will choose with whom to share it and on what terms.

Network Intelligence

Lenny described network intelligence as an opportunity to make predictive sense of the zettabytes of data available today. Romi added it is an opportunity to stop thinking of your limited network, for example, your company’s direct employees, and rather think about the networks to which they belong and how to start bringing that intelligence to bear. He cited the involvement of 4 separate companies in the current webinar as a good example of leveraging network intelligence.

Social Monitoring

Romi described the geometric expansion in the amount of data available about brands, companies and individuals. He painted the picture of a future where each of us has a brand equity ticker measuring the sentiment expressed about us on the web. Lenny described social monitoring as a way to get to the great untapped pool of information proliferating online.

Panel Communities

Lenny described panel communities as the great compromise between the traditional online panel model and the highly interactive online community model. He described it as involving a greater investment on both sides – the research company and the consumer. Romi urged looking at constant feedback instead of episodic interaction.

User Experience

Lenny said that since consumers have the power to choose where to go easily, a substandard user experience is no longer going to cut it. He said that market research traditionally has not been designed with consumer experience in mind. Romi underscored how easy it is for consumers to opt out and gave an example showing how user experience can be extremely powerful in either a negative or a positive way.

Mobile Sampling and Ethnography

Lenny indicated that the impact of mobile cannot be overstated and that emerging markets are leapfrogging the PC experience entirely. He said the app model structurally builds in consumer consent to share and receive information. Romi said the greatest power of mobile – more than convenience – is that is allows us contact with the consumer in situ.

Q&A

The question-and-answer session was the best part of the event. Don’t miss it!

Filed Under: Events, Featured, Gamification, Innovation, Market Research, Marketing, Mobile, Social Media, Video Tagged With: Consumerization, Gamification, Mobile, Network Intelligence, online panel, Panel Communities, Social Monitoring, user experience

Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Blog

December 13, 2011 By Brian Whalley Leave a Comment

After you’ve been blogging for a few months, it’s a good idea to take a step back, examine what’s worked, and refine your blogging strategy. Especially if you have only recently begun blogging, it’s important to frequently review your strategy and successes, to make sure that you are progressing toward your goals. This can be hard to do if you aren’t sure how to go about measuring your blog accurately, or how to draw the correct judgement out of your information. Let’s examine one methodology to review your blog’s analytics and determine successes. To get started, log into whatever analytics platform that you prefer for your blog, be it Google Analytics, HubSpot, or whatever else is available to you.

Once you’ve signed into your blog, gather all of your blog’s data and export it to a spreadsheet so that you can slice it up and look at it from different angles. Your blog software can usually provide you with this general data, including the author name for each of your posts. If not, you may need to combine data from different systems. This way, you can easily build averages for each of your blog authors for how many views their posts get, or other criteria that you’re interested in. Depending on what data your blog can export, you have many options here – If it exports the tags for each post for example, you could also cut across the tags and see which of your blog’s tags generates the most views, tweets, or conversions on a regular basis.

Break Down Your Post Success By Author

Begin reviewing your blog’s performance by looking at clear breakdowns of your posts, such as by the author. This is an easy to access piece of data, and can show you who your real star authors are. Here is a Google Doc that can help you visualize how to break down your blog analytics by author. If you’d like to use it to get started, you should download it or save it on your own.

While the left contains the raw data from some sample blog analytics, the right hand side breaks down blog post performance by author. In this example, you can see that the average post by Kurt just isn’t performing as well as the other authors. This sheet can’t divine why Kurt’s posts aren’t performing as well, but it can point out the trends that you need to make your own observations. You can take this spreadsheet with you for your analysis – Just paste in your own blog’s data for post title, date, views, and authors into the left, and then fill in the right with the name of each blogger who writes for you regularly.

Look At Other Variables

This process works just as well if if you replace the content of Column D with another attribute that you know – For example, the post category, time of day, or other information. For example, you can do some surface-level research very easily into what times of day are most successful for your blog if you’ve previously tried out publishing posts at different times of the day. Go through your last two months of blog posts and categorize them into rough times of day, like “Morning”, “Afternoon”, “Evening” and “Weekend”. That way, you can break down the post averages by when you post them and see if different times of day lead to more successful posts for you. If you haven’t tried this out yet, spend a month varying up your posting times for your posts, and then check out if there are any consistent patterns.

Consider Your Business Goals

Finally, consider the business goals for your blog. Are you trying to generate conversions or leads? Or establish a presence as an authority on a subject? Review what metric you are trying to change by having a blog, and then look at how you can bring this into the analysis. Remember that the most important part of blogging is how it plays into moving your goals as a business organization. Do not just blog for the sake of doing it; if something is not working in your strategy, or if your marketing analytics show that your hard work is not translating into success, change things up until you find something that makes you successful.

Filed Under: Featured, How-To, Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: Best Practices, blogging, Marketing, Marketing Measurement, Social Media

Exactly How Responsible Are We For Privacy?

December 7, 2011 By Dana Stanley Leave a Comment

Facebook recently entered a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission admitting all manner of fraud in its privacy policies. The list of violations admitted are shocking enough to make the most hardened among us blush.

Here is the list of violations to which Facebook admitted, from the FTC announcement.

“Facebook changed its website so certain information that users may have designated as private – such as their Friends List – was made public. They didn’t warn users that this change was coming, or get their approval in advance.”
“Facebook represented that third-party apps that users’ installed would have access only to user information that they needed to operate. In fact, the apps could access nearly all of users’ personal data – data the apps didn’t need.”
“Facebook told users they could restrict sharing of data to limited audiences – for example with ‘Friends Only.’ In fact, selecting ‘Friends Only’ did not prevent their information from being shared with third-party applications their friends used.”
“Facebook had a ‘Verified Apps’ program & claimed it certified the security of participating apps. It didn’t.”
“Facebook promised users that it would not share their personal information with advertisers. It did.”
“Facebook claimed that when users deactivated or deleted their accounts, their photos and videos would be inaccessible. But Facebook allowed access to the content, even after users had deactivated or deleted their accounts.”
“Facebook claimed that it complied with the U.S.- EU Safe Harbor Framework that governs data transfer between the U.S. and the European Union. It didn’t.”

We shouldn’t be surprised that Facebook would use every means at its disposal to gain a business advantage (especially if you’ve see The Social Network), but the sheer impunity of the violations is still shocking.

Facebook agreed to a long list of reforms, but do you still feel good about using social media data in your research analysis?

If you have any grounding in the history of market research and its respect for respondent privacy, you should pause to consider the implications of the Facebook settlement for the future of market research.

Research-Live.com editor Brian Tarran writes about this dilemma in his recent post, “What the Facebook FTC settlement means for market research.”

“The question is, how do researchers respond knowing that errors of technology and ethical judgement might be commonplace?” Tarran writes. “Can they – and more importantly, should they – trust the promises a site makes to its users about its terms of service or privacy policy? Legal recourse for misuse of data might land on the website itself, but does that mean researchers are absolved of all ethical and moral responsibility to the people they are taking data from?”

These are important issues, indeed. As an industry, we should keep our eyes wide open and continue to be the skeptical data consumers we have been trained to be.

We should use our professional judgement to exclude data where there is a reasonable supposition that privacy violations exist.

We should lend our strong support to proper regulatory efforts like the FTC’s investigation as privacy advocates and as professionals with an interest in data integrity.

Once we’ve taken those steps, though, we’ve done our part.

We should then keep forging ahead and using social media data in our analyses.

It would be a shame if our noble concern for privacy were to stop us from innovating and taking advantage of new data sources, data collection methodologies and analytical techniques.

The reality is we are limited in our ability to control the privacy policies and practices of other organizations. We must rely on the proper authorities to enforce privacy violations. We should have a critical approach to our use of data.

Beyond that, we have satisfied our responsibility, and we should proceed boldly.

Photo Credit: Alan Cleaver

Filed Under: Essay, Featured, Government, Market Research, Social Media Tagged With: Best Practices, Facebook, Government, Market Research, Privacy, Social Media, Social Media Research

Focus Groups are Dead: An Interview with Mike Volpe, HubSpot CMO

November 28, 2011 By Dana Stanley 2 Comments

Mike Volpe, Chief Marketing Officer of HubSpot

Editor’s Note: I recently attended the Social Media FTW (For the Win) conference where HubSpot‘s Chief Marketing Officer, Mike Volpe was a keynote speaker. During his talk, Mike contrasted the analytics HubSpot gives marketers with traditional feedback, using focus groups as an example. I caught up with Mike afterward to get his further perspectives on market research and marketing.

Dana Stanley: For those who don’t know, could you please give a quick overview of what HubSpot does for marketers? In particular, how does it help with marketing analytics?

Mike Volpe: HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing software platform. Rather than using one tool for blogging, another tool for social media marketing, a different tool for landing pages, yet another tool for email marketing, some other tool for marketing automation and yet an additional system for marketing analytics, HubSpot combines all of that into one.

This is powerful for marketers for two reasons: first, you have one hub to manage all of your marketing which is faster and easier, and second, you can easily measure and analyze things across all these different marketing tools. For instance, HubSpot gives you closed loop marketing analytics, so you can link it to your CRM system and know not only how many web visitors you got from social media, but also how many of them became a lead and how many of those leads converted into customers. Or, you could measure how many of your leads that became customers visited a specific web page on your website or used certain functionality in your mobile app, etc.

DS: In your recent keynote at Social Media FTW, you said, “Focus groups are dead.” Can you tell me what you meant by that?

MV: Of course “dead” is strong language meant to invite a response and dialog. Focus groups still have their place, however they are much less useful or attractive today for two reasons.

First, the low cost availability of other ways of gathering information about your market and customers. You can listen to what they say in social media, you can read the reviews they write. You can analyze how they actually use your website. You can see the videos and blogs they post about your products.

Second, I think the information you can get today is a more accurate view into your customers, because it is based on their actual behavior, not how they answer questions in an unfamiliar room with 5 strangers. I’ll take the status update that someone wrote from the couch in the comfort of their own home as more accurate than the comment they made in a focus group room when they are given a $100 gift card to show up.

DS: Your company has been on an impressive growth path. How does HubSpot take stock of and incorporate feedback from customers and prospects?

MV: We get feedback in a number of different ways. We conduct usability sessions where we have someone use the product online while we watch and they talk us through what they are doing, we have discussion forums for customers that we monitor, we get feedback from the sales team on what people say when they they demo the product, we have usage monitoring built into the product that gives us reports about what customers do and don’t do in the product, we have ideas.hubspot.com where customers can submit ideas to make the product better, we visit HUG (HubSpot User Group) meetings and we regularly survey the customers as well.

DS: What do you envision market research will be like in the future?

I think it will allow for faster and cheaper insights and more witnessing of actual real life activity, not simulated activity.

Filed Under: Digital, Featured, Market Research, Marketing, Planning, Social Media Tagged With: Market Research, Marketing, Social Media

Sentiment Analysis Firm Metavana’s New CMO, Romi Mahajan: An Interview

November 17, 2011 By Dana Stanley Leave a Comment

Romi Mahajan

Romi Mahajan is a well-known technology marketing speaker and expert; he serves on a variety of advisory boards and speaks at over a dozen industry events per year.  He most recently served as the Worldwide Director of Sales and Strategy for the Digital Marketing and Search team at Microsoft.  Prior to Microsoft, Romi was founder of the KKM Group and served as CMO of Ascentium Group.

Romi is also one of the founders of Research Access, and he has been a vital contributor to the online conversation about marketing and research.

Dana Stanley: Congratulations on your new position as CMO of Metavana. You’ve been a regular contributor to Research Access in the past, and I hope your new responsiblities will allow time for some continued guest posting!

For those who might not be familiar with Metavana, could you please take a moment to explain what the company does?

Romi Mahajan: Dana, writing for Research Access has been such a joy that I hope you allow me to continue to offer an opinion here and there!

I’m excited about my new role as CMO of Metavana, precisely because I believe we can make a real dent in reality with this company and really serve customers and the industry.

Metavana is at its essence a sentiment engine. What this means is that our engine can parse and make meaning of the geometrically-growing and unstructured/emotional content on the Social Web. We want to help redefine the Voice of the Customer and move it into the mainstream of business planning.

DS: There are increasingly more companies these days in what’s come to be called the field of Sentiment Analysis. I understand Metavana has some unique ways of analyzing, scoring and packaging web sentiment. Could you give us a sense of the scientific principles used in Metavana analysis?

RM: Metavana attempts to solve a tough problem that is governed by the following 4 connected notions:

The Social Web is truly the “Big Data” Web. There are 250 million tweets a day and 800,000 Facebook posts an hour. And so on…
The content on the Social Web is unstructured, asyntactic, often ungrammatical, and emotion — versus ordered, clear, factual data. It’s chaos; the tower of Babel writ large.
The Social Web is always-on- 24/7/365 and is worldwide.
Despite all of this, the Social Web reveals important truths about each of our brands….

We believe this is not a smart engineering problem but is really a physics and non-linear math problem. That is what we’ve based our algorithms on.

DS: It wasn’t that long ago that market research was considered to be surveys and focus groups – and that’s all. How do you think Sentiment Analysis – and Metavana in particular – fits into the overall market research picture?

RM: Look, market research has its place in the world but has not quite risen to the challenge of the Internet and Social Age. Market research tends to be episodic, one-off, and sequestered in the organization. Further, market research often lacks timeliness and context. Sentiment analysis (and Metavana by extension) change this by helping organizations understand the Voice of the Customer in real-time and in the real context (emotional, etc.) — that is what will define the next phase in the market research evolution. I believe in market research and want it to shine and have its rightful place.

DS: How will you use analytics and research in your role as CMO of an exciting internet company?

RM: Beautiful question, and I won’t sugar-coat. We’ll analytics and research in the company to determine market sizing, the “nature of the beast” we are trying to slay, and what customers and partners feel and think. But in a startup you go with gut often and you hope that decades of collective wisdom are brought to bear to do the right thing!

Filed Under: Featured, Market Research, Marketing, Social Media Tagged With: Big Data, Market Research, Marketing, Sentiment Analysis, Social Media, Social Web

How to Use Facebook for Market Research Surveys

November 15, 2011 By Dana Stanley 1 Comment

It’s an understatement to say that there’s tremendous interest in using Facebook for market research. Indeed, among the most popular posts on Research Access is one written last year by Survey Analytics‘ CEO Vivek Bhaskaran, entitled “Social Media Research – Using Facebook for Survey Invitations and Market Research.”

What not everybody realizes is that companies are using the power of Facebook’s large audience to conduct research every day.

While Facebook-fueled surveys are not right for every situation, they can be extremely powerful in the right circumstance. The biggest advantage is access to a massive audience of people who do not normally complete surveys. However, even Facebook’s large audience will not necessarily yield a sample from the target audience you are trying to reach. In addition, sampling through Facebook Ads can be expensive, depending on the particulars of your study.

Since Vivek wrote his Facebook sampling post last year, there have been many changes to Facebook, but the fundamental principle outlined in that post still holds true. So it’s time for an update.

Also, I will explain how to use company or brand fan pages to get valuable feedback.

1) Use Facebook Pages to Reach Your Customers and Fans.

You can ask followers of your company or brand fan page (or your personal page, for that matter) to provide feedback in several ways.

Post an open-ended question asking for direct feedback. For example, “We are looking for feedback on Research Access’ new look and feel. What do you think?” You can add language encouraging people to post their comments on Facebook, or you can give an email address for them to contact you directly. The feedback you receive will be useful but will not be generalizable to all customers or fans.

Post a poll. Facebook now has a “Question” option in the status update box allowing you to post a poll to your fans. Please note: you can only do one question at a time, and the results will be visible to all fans. Interestingly, there is an option to allow your fans to add responses which you didn’t necessarily consider when creating your question.

Post a link to a survey. Instead of using Facebook’s built-in question function, you can simply share a link to a survey. You should also include explanatory text in the post. Here’s a hypothetical example Research Access could use: “Please take 5 minutes to give us feedback on Research Access’ new look and feel. Everyone who completes the survey will receive a free eBook copy of QuestionPro for Dummies.”

2) Use Facebook Ads to Reach a Wider Audience.

Using Facebook Ads, you can open your survey up to a massive audience which can be targeted in very specific ways. Here are the steps for directing Facebook users to your survey using Facebook.

Start creating a Facebook by clicking the “Create an Ad” link in the “Sponsored” section in the right-hand column of your page.

Create an ad with an image and a message that will drive the right type of traffic and redirect those who click on the ad to an externally hosted survey. Select “External URL” in the “Destination” drop-down list. Put your custom survey URL in the “URL” field. Use the “Title” and “Body” fields to create a compelling call-to-action for survey-takers. Be sure to include an image that will garner attention. In the “Targeting” section, you can target your survey by geography, age, specific interests and more.

Define your budget and schedule. With Facebook Ads you have a great deal of control over your ad’s schedule. Importantly, you can define a daily budget which will not be exceeded.

Finally, preview your ad, then start your campaign! Good luck.

Filed Under: How-To, Market Research, Social Media Tagged With: DIY, Facebook, Market Research, Methodology, Social Media

A Social Media Marketer’s Take on Market Research

November 9, 2011 By Dana Stanley Leave a Comment

Elijah Young

I experienced Elijah Young’s keynote session on blogging and social media at the Social Media FTW (“For the Win”) Fall conference in September.

‘Experienced’ is the right word, because Elijah is such a dynamic and engaging speaker, simply saying ‘saw’ or ‘listened to’ would not due justice to the feeling of energy in the room. Elijah inspired and motivated people to blog while giving plenty of practical tips and infusing the talk with lots of humor.

In short, he was a big hit.

Elijah is the co-founder of Fandura, a company that creates social web pages and applications for businesses of all types. He is an expert in a wide range of topics, from social media to application development to entrepreneurship. He graciously agreed to an interview with me.

DS: Many of our readers are market researcher entrepreneurs looking to promote their businesses online. Social media and online marketing can seem like an overwhelming time-suck. What activities would you advise people looking to market their businesses online to focus on?

EY: I think a lot of entrepreneurs start with deciding they will use social media, then try to find their customer on those platforms. In my opinion that’s backwards. You have to find out where your client is online (if they’re online at all) and then go where they are.

As researchers, I’m sure your readers know that some of the best tidbits of information can be found in an old journal, or some resource that may not be available online yet, and your customers are the same way.

One example I used when I owned a social-type company was that we needed to attract a customer base, but the “in” thing to do was to advertise on social media. In my opinion that’s like being a track and field coach looking for new people to train at the Olympics. We found that there was a freelance site that had an untapped (at least by US providers) market for people looking to jump into that market, and we were able to take advantage of that entire market, hungry for a provider, by ourselves with little or no competition until we had already created a brand name for ourselves.

We decided to focus on customers who we knew would pay first, because I have a philosophy that you’re not a business if you’re not making revenue. It may take a while to find out where the people in your market that want to spend money TODAY are, but it’s always worth the effort if you can find them, because your competitors are busy fighting over the low hanging fruit.

DS: Your company develops mobile applications, including games. One of the hot topics in market research is gamification – that is, making it more fun for survey-takers to share information with us by adding game elements to the way we collect data. What do you think?

EY: Everybody likes a good experience, and people are inherently competitive, so “gamification” works alot of times. My only concern is that people rely too much on making their system into a game, and they start to forget about the core thing they wanted from the user in the first place.

For example, I’m all for researchers getting users excited about taking part in a “game-style” version of a survey, but think about how that will affect the info that you get from the user. Will you get a survey skewed by the users emotion, will they be distracted by the gameplay and just blast through the survey to get to the next game-style moment?

I think a lot of entrepreneurs get excited about the bells and whistles and tend to forget about the core, and staying true to your core sometimes means skipping out on all of the fluff.

DS: How does Fandura make use of research?

EY: I love research, but I think that tons of businesses miss what I call “free research moments”. At Fandura we really focus on every question that a customer asks during the sales process, because that’s free market research.

Every question we answer gets turned into an educational piece of marketing material, every stumbling block we encounter gets turned inot a resource guide. It’s a simple philosophy of, “our clients are more alike than different”, so we think they will ask the same questions, and go through the same troubles from project to project.

If we pay attention to those free research moments, we don’t have to worry about what our competitors are doing. In our industry, the customer is never educated, and by having the largest library of education at their fingertips, it gives us two advantages: One, we’ll get to build better customers, more knowledgeable and better equipped to avoid getting into a negative relationship with a developer, and two, we get to frame what a positive relationship looks like. So with our educational library, we now become the measuring stick that potential clients use when they talk to other developers, and we’ll take that bet every time.

Note: Elijah Young writes for the Fandura Blog, and he can also be found on Social Media Examiner. You can follow him on Twitter at @ElijahRYoung.

Filed Under: Featured, Gamification, Market Research, Marketing, Mobile, Social Media Tagged With: Gamification, Market Research, Marketing, Mobile, Social Media

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