What's New
Top Categories
See All
- Strategic Innovation (64)
- Experience Design (63)
- Art and Culture (62)
- Technology (59)
- Industrial Design (51)
- Web (43)
Top Tags
See All
Uncategorized
We have seen social media take a new and increasing role in the word-of-mouth (WOM) consumer influence paradigm; word of mouth traditionally meant consumers speaking directly to one another and sharing experiences with products or services which have had an impact on their lives (good or bad). Of course, communication between people (most of which may be potential consumers) is what social media is all about. This is one of the reasons why social media is so interesting for marketers; a consumer hearing a recommendation (or negative comment) from a friend or acquaintance can be so much more powerful and authentic than a company communication.
Not only does social media offer a medium where consumers can share potent product and service experiences, but the range is impressive as well….the definition of ‘friend’ or ‘acquaintance’ has perhaps shifted from years past, meaning we may now be open to receiving advice from a wider range of people.
The challenge is that market research, as an industry, seems to be struggling to keep up with the measurement of the new WOM paradigm. While usage and attitude toward social media can be tracked (such as hours per day, channels used, etc) can be tracked, specific interactions are less easily measured. It can be very difficult for respondents to recall on a survey instrument, when and where they have noticed brand mentions and/or brand communications online, even though these touchpoints may have had an impact on perceptions of the brand.
This means that currently, measurement of the online and social media WOM impact is often left to web analytic firms. It must be said that the approach may also be flawed, in that measurement of web ‘page views’ and social media ‘product mentions’ a) do not take into account touchpoints that are unseen and unsold (such as a poorly placed web ad that is simply not seen), and b) must guess as to what these metrics mean for the brand.
We at Idea Couture have a few ideas as to how to tackle these issues, but feel it would be interesting to hear ideas from the community on how this can be handled. If there are creative ways to both a) track consumer interaction on social media, and b) measure the impact of this on perceptions of the brand (or, perhaps more importantly, sales of same!), please let us know your thoughts!
Comments (1)
Post a comment
Contributor
Patrick Dunn
Patrick is an experienced research specialist with broad international and industry experience consulting with Fortune 500 clientele on market entry/research projects. Project experience includes...
See Profile
Recent Posts from this contributor
- Cheering for the “Away Team”: Satisfaction and Sport
December 17th, 2009 - The Art of War- Attack Marketing
July 7th, 2009 - Have you been receiving "world-class" customer service from your service provider?
June 25th, 2009
Noodleplay delivers.
Select from the menu below:
Copyright 2008-2010 by Idea Couture Inc. All rights reserved.
Posted by:
Nael El Shawwa
Sep 16, 2009 at 4:07 pm
Great post Patrick. I think its rather tricky to measure the impact of social media interactions on e-commerce and how they contribute to the bottom line. The impact on sales at brick and mortar stores is even more tricky. The contribution definitely exists though but the connection seems blurry at least to me just because most of the time there may be a lag between when the interaction occurred and when the sale happened.
At this stage what the social web is still missing is your global identity – one that travels around with you from one site to the other. There are promising movements today such as OpenID, OpenSocial, Google Profile, etc. but these are still in their early days and have not reached mass adoption. Now all of this comes with privacy concerns, but maybe some people would opt in for a more open web (i.e. less privacy) in return for a more relevant experience. An example would be Amazon’s book suggestion list getting driven off your tweets, facebook profile, followers, friends, etc. For example if I am following an author on Twitter, there is a good chance that I would buy a book by them if it were suggested by Amazon.
After this global identity is in place, the next piece in the puzzle is a widget that would tie all these separate events together in the case of the author/amazon example:
- Someone I am following republishes a post from the author
- I see it, and the read the blog post from that author
- I find it interesting and follow that author
- Now next time Amazon e-mails an offer, they can add a book or 2 from that author in their email blast. The fact that I followed him serves as a green light for this event.
- If I do purchase the book, then we can quantify the value of social media on sales.
For the brick and mortar sales, maybe this global identity would live on your cell phone? But now you get into another level of privacy concerns.
At least two challenges of this:
- how to get online sales channels to adopt this
- how to avoid freaking out users – big brother kind of thing. How to convince them that a little less privacy can mean a lot more relevant online experience?
Eventually the web will get to this point, maybe in another 5 years at least for e-commerce because in the end not doing this is literally leaving a lot of money on the table.