Part I
Steps to Effective Listening
A conversation about listening takes place nearly every day at the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), and like most new concepts, people talk about it differently depending on their perspective. As an industry organization, we aim to be rigorous and inclusive on matters that affect our advertiser, media, research, agency association, and academic members. Since good investigators begin by standardizing definitions, that's where we will start. The ARF defines listening as:
The study of naturally occurring conversations, behaviors, and signals that may or may not be guided, that brings the voice of people's lives into the brand.
Let's dissect this definition and explain our reasoning.
“The study of naturally occurring conversations, behavior, and signals…”
The study of: People's authentic, unfiltered thoughts, feelings, and emotions
naturally occurring conversations: Those that take place among people and through interactions with brands or companies in an open, noncoercive manner
behavior: Observing what people do, such as shopping or using brands
and signals: That people emit silently, such as through gesturing or biometric measures
“That may, or may not, be guided…”
That may/be guided: Directed by other people, brands, or organizations in ways that focus naturally occurring conversations on agreed-upon topics
Or may not/be guided: Conversations take their own direction
“To bring the voice of people's lives into the brand.”
To bring the voice of people's lives: Through deep insights and convincing stories
Into the brand: To evolve the relationship and take actions for mutual benefit
Our definition aims to convey several key ideas. First, listening is concerned with what people say, how they act, and how they react on the “inside.” In other words, it's not just focused on online conversations. Second, listening brands have responsibilities to people; they must be extraordinarily perceptive and respectful, and become their advocate. Last, brands and customers are in a learning relationship over time; both improve when each listens and responds to the other. The relationship is not reactive, but anticipatory and evolutionary.
You'll notice that our definition does not restrict conversations to online sources; rather, it acknowledges that they take place everywhere. Neither does it reference research methodology, tools, or techniques. Decisions about where and how to listen should be determined by the project, brand, customers, and expertise of those involved.
Listen First! Focuses on Social Media Conversations
This book is concerned with listening to social media conversations, because that's where the listening action is today. But since listening is also about anticipating, we sprinkle in a few instances of listening to behavior and signals. See Dr. Carl Marci's essay in Chapter 19 for a glimpse into the biometric future of listening.
Research Tasks: Social Media Listening Performs
Part II: Listening-Led Marketing and Advertising: Applying Social Media Listening Insights to Achieve Key Objectives shows how strategies based on listening research enable companies to accomplish a wide variety of marketing objectives. Social media listening provides different ways to perform many of the customary research tasks that are central to developing winning marketing and advertising strategies. In fact, listening's range of research applications often surprises people—“I didn't know it could be used for that!”—because listening is stereotypically thought of in fairly narrow terms, as a substitute for focus groups or other qualitative research, or as a way to monitor conversations for mentions of brands, people, or words or phrases of interest. Look at this range of uses, all taken from case studies in this book.
Understand mind-sets: Explore people's culture, views, values, and lifestyles that influence their interests, thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Companies seek to learn how consumers cope with changing economic circumstances, or take on new roles—such as caregiving (both in Chapter 4)—or act within a product category, such as credit cards (see Chapter 9).
Profile customers and prospects: Develop insights into people for marketing and advertising products and services, as was done for spirits, motorcycles, and e-tailer marketers (see Chapter 5). Go further by developing engaging loyalty programs (see Chapter 15).
Sense early market shifts: Anticipate changes that challenge existing business and present opportunities for new business, such as being able to recognize that customers are changing in unexpected ways—as a maker of electronic games detected (see Chapter 5).
Detect problems: Uncover the issues that impede sales and/or customer satisfaction, such as product or service issues, poor executions and experiences, or faulty retail strategy. Reveal unmet needs that companies can address, or remedies that can convert into new business opportunities or greater customer satisfaction (Chapters 8 and 14).
Analyze competitors: Compare rivals along various dimensions to develop strategies or tactics capable of creating advantage. For example, when new competitors enter the marketplace, learn and assess how customers position competing products on benefits, or size up strengths and weaknesses (see Chapter 13 for examples).
Target and segment: Categorize people based on their interests or actions as reflected in their conversations and the cultural contexts within which those conversations take place. Movie marketers, for instance, target and segment their audience according to facets such as interest in actors, type of movie, or special effects, whereas car companies target by reaching people who talk about them organically. Interest in multicultural listening is growing, as many realize how it can help marketers become more inclusive and expand their customer base (Chapters 5 and 14).
Uncover sales drivers and predict sales: Identify customer factors—such as the volume of social media activity, advocacy, and reviews—and the specifics within them that can be modeled to predict sales, as has been done in categories like books, consumer electronics, and entertainment (see Chapter 18).
Complement “asking” research: Bring multiple sources of data to bear on a marketing or advertising issue in order to enrich understanding. For example, one razor manufacturer surveyed and listened to lapsed users, or people who had stopped buying. The surveys documented the percentages of lapsed usage, and the listening research explained the reasons why people stopped buying (Chapter 12).
Innovation, R&D, co-creation: Develop new products, services, or enhancements by listening and, in some cases, involving customers and prospects in the process, as food companies, technology firms, and auto manufacturers have done (see Chapters 11 and 13).
Test concepts: Learn if new product ideas resonate with customers and prospects; acquire feedback on new services or features, as was done by a new food product (Chapter 11) and a venerable magazine (see Chapter 16).
Discover/evaluate brand attributes: Uncover the features most important to customers and prospects, as a car company (Chapter 14) or researchers did for a consumer electronics product (Chapter 18).
Develop and evaluate messages: Create messages that resonate with customer or prospect mind-sets, or modify them so they do. Chapter 12 shows how one personal care product learned its value proposition was off, and then repaired it accordingly. Cutting-edge techniques that gauge emotional responses to communication pave new pathways to insight and understanding effectiveness (see Chapter 19).
Identify threats to reputation: Understand and respond to the issues and events that can undermine and weaken a company, product reputation, or its future prospects (Chapter 17).
Though this list, generated solely from the cases discussed in this book, is extensive, it doesn't exhaust the research applications being explored, tested, and, probably, being kept under wraps for competitive reasons. For example, companies are developing brand trackers that incorporate listening data in two ways: as sources for attribute lists, so that the trackers are more in tune with people's conversations and interests; and as supplements to surveys, brand metrics, and regularly reported business measures like sales. Social media-based “numbers” essential to functions like media planning and buying are emerging that add insight into the quality of audiences and their marketing “fit” for specific companies, products, and services. Expect to see innovations like these and others appearing soon.
Two Types of Research Using Social Media Listening
Social media listening divides into two categories: social media monitoring and social research. Tom O'Brien and David Rabjohns (2010) supply working definitions of these terms:
Both types of effort deliver value; the trick is matching the right type of listening to the goals of your business. Monitoring applications tends to be more tactical, such as noticing comments, issues, or problems, and dealing with them expeditiously. Adept monitoring helps guide the response when someone calls out a particular product or company—whether it's negative, as it was for Hasbro (Chapter 17), or positive, as it was for Gatorade (Chapter 12). Poorly executed monitoring and response may lead to reputation problems that can range from trivial to severe. However, it's always best if these are handled properly and quickly, such as the Motrin Moms who ignited a firestorm of protest over an ad strategy, and pressured Motrin to pull the ad (Matson 2008). Chapters 12 and 14 provide many examples that rely on social media monitoring.
Social Media Monitoring: Tracking online brand mentions on a daily basis for PR, brand protection, operations and customer service, outreach, and engagement.
Social Research: Analyzing naturally occurring online conversation categories to better understand why people do what they do; the role of brands in their lives; and the product, branding, and communications implications for brand owners.
Social research is more strategic: It delves into underlying human concerns, attitudes, motivations, emotions, preferences, and the needs people have that shape their mind-sets and, ultimately, their actions, whether it is shopping, buying, or merely watching a TV program. Done well, social research uncovers pivotal insights that guide not only marketing and advertising, but also innovation, product development, customer service, and just about all business functions that touch customers, prospects, the trade, and other relevant stakeholders. Several of the case studies in Part II, where we show the contribution of listening research to achieving marketing objectives, provide examplary cases that all companies can learn from. Several particularly valuable ones to consider are the Hennessy Cognac and Suzuki Hayabusa cases in Chapter 10, the CPG manufacturer of home storage solutions in Chapter 12, and the example regarding X Factor in Chapter 15.
Benefits of Listening Research
We interviewed a variety of researchers experienced with listening at advertisers, media companies, advertising and media agencies, and research companies to share with us their hard-won learnings about the benefits and advantages of listening, compared with traditional surveys and focus groups. In their words, listening offers the ability to detect early signals, make timely adjustments, and understand people in their own terms. They value listening for its abilities to provide:
- Speed and timeliness: Guidance can be acquired in days or weeks, not months.
- Flexibility and course correction: Changes can be made quickly if the research isn't being productive or if new avenues should be explored.
- The ability to frame research in consumer terms, not researcher language.
- Opportunities for listening to and analyzing unfiltered conversations.
- Answers to questions researchers did not think to ask.
- Large sample sizes.
- Cost advantages—although these need to be evaluated not only on dollars alone but also on efficiencies or results that are gained.
To this list we will add the ability to use “historical” data, or “backcast,” for research initiatives. Unlike traditional methods, which have to start from day zero in most cases, listening research begins with an available datastream. That means that you can begin developing insights the day projects start, complete with trends, the ability to compare periods of time, and, perhaps most important, the freedom to ask new and different questions as the research proceeds, without requiring more money or extra time to collect and analyze new data. Because all data is automatically put into context, analytic and interpretive richness arises, and greater confidence in the insights results.
Listening research innovations are coming fast and furious. On the social side, researchers are gaining more experience daily by using listening data to do the nuts-and-bolts research that marketers and advertisers need, and by adapting research traditions to take advantage of social media data. An example of this is netnography, a digital form of ethnography (Kozinets 2010, Pettit 2010, Verhaege et al. 2009). There are more than 150 software applications and services available, and new ones appear daily that claim to address a new need or solve some problem. All this activity and innovation does not mean that we have to approach research differently; it simply requires that we do some new things and use different tools. The principles of doing good research endure.
Planning, running, and evaluating social media listening programs require the same discipline as managing a research project or continuous research program. The differences—and they are crucial—reside in the operational specifics—the skills needed, tools, methods, data, and analysis—but not in the aims and ends to which the research insights are applied. For many readers, the differences will likely be challenging to what we know about market research (“How can we answer questions we didn't think of asking?”), but the chapters in Part I intend to explain the unfamiliar and guide the way forward to understanding listening and doing it effectively.
Principles for Effective Listening Research
The first three chapters explain the “how” of social media listening; it is intended to be a very practical, approachable guide for most readers. We do not get into very fine technical matters; rather, we highlight the issues or controversies that are generally important.
Listening initiatives follow a sequence of steps, and that is how the chapters are organized and progress:
Chapter 1: Organize for Listening and Define Objectives, Key Measures, and Conversations
- Organize for listening.
- Set objectives in relation to business goals.
- Define key performance indicators (KPIs).
- Determine the “research subjects”: the voices and conversation sources best suited for the listening program.
Chapter 2: Evaluate and Select Listening Solutions
- Listening tools: overview and key features in five categories: Search, Monitoring, Text Analytics, Communities, and Full-service Vendors
Chapter 3: Field, Analyze, Report, and Evaluate
- “Field” the research: Run the listening program; establish methods and tools for “data processing”—the harvesting, cleaning, and processing of conversations.
- Analyze and report the data: Communicate the insights.
- Evaluate, appreciate, and commit to next steps.
Earlier, we distinguished social media monitoring from social media research. While both types of listening efforts share these steps, the types of work and levels of commitment are different. Those primarily monitoring conversations and alerting when something important comes up have different needs from those conducting research using heavy text analytics, working with full-service vendors, or running communities. As we move through the principles for effective listening research, we'll call attention to places where considerations for monitoring and social research differ.
Social media listening research is used for many of the same purposes as traditional market research. Listening research is divided into two spheres, social media monitoring and social research, which are tactical and strategic, respectively. Listening research is innovating rapidly, and there are many solutions available to companies. Although the tools and some of the methods are different from familiar research methods like survey research and focus groups, the principles guiding research are unchanging.
Kozinets, Robert V. (2010). Netnography: Doing Ethnographic Research Online, London: Sage Publications, Inc.
O'Brien, Tom, and David Rabjohns. (2010). “Social Media Monitoring Is Not Research,” essay prepared for the Advertising Research Foundation.
Matson, John. (2008, November 17). “‘Motrin Moms,’ a-Twitter over Ad, Take on Big Pharma—And Win,” ScientificAmerican.com news blog, www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=motrin-moms-a-twitter-over-ad-take-2008-11-17 (accessed September 27, 2010).
Pettit, Annie. (2010). “From Bit and Bytes to Brilliant Breakthroughs,” essay prepared for the Advertising Research Foundation.
Verhaege, Annelies, Niels Schillewaert, and Emilie van den Berge. (2009). “Getting Answers without Asking Questions, www.insites.eu/02/documents/whitepapers/04_Getting_answers_without_asking_questions.pdf (accessed December 19, 2010).