Social Listening & Research

May 10, 2013

Gibson Patterson

Social Media Strategist at Razorfish

@gibsonpatt

The three aspects of listening

Monitoring Mining Measuring

Social Listening informs Social Activations

Source: January 14, 2012 http://susanetlinger.wordpress.com/2012/01/14/defining-social-media-listening-vs-measurement/

But you need a tool to do Social Listening efficiently…

Some of the key vendors

While these tools are user-friendly, you need to speak their language…

Definition of Boolean Logic

These terms include (but are definitely not limited to):

AND – apple AND pie will retrieve all posts containing both words OR – apple OR pie will retrieve all posts containing either word NOT – apple NOT pie will retrieve all posts containing the word apple unless they also include the word pie “exact phrase”- “apple pie” will pull back all posts talking about apple pie but not posts discussing apples and pies separately in the same post. Wildcards - air* would yield airport, airline, airfare Compound Searches - pie AND (apple OR peach OR cherry) the search will capture all posts that mention the word pie and at least one of the three words Proximity – “apple pie”~5 will capture all posts that have both terms within five words of each other

Source: Visible Intelligence

And it takes practice.

What kind of info can you expect from social listening?

Current pop culture makes a fun case study…

Trending

Trending

Share of Voice/Volume

Word Clouds

But wait…there was something much more important that happened that week…

Trending

Trending - Comparison

Share of Voice/Volume

Media Types

Sentiment?

Natural Language Processing

Source: Netbase

Natural Language Processing I know Listerine kills germs because it hurts. Text Analytics I know Listerine kills germs because it hurts. Keyword Search I know Listerine kills germs because it hurts.

(brand) (positive benefit) (reason)

(negative words) (negative word) (brand)

(keyword) (keyword) (keyword) (keyword) (keyword) (keyword)

Be sure to always…

Put the project in writing. Having the brands and categories you are supposed to be analyzing upfront will save time and stress later

Plan ahead. Social listening is often more time consuming than you think

Clean the data. Do not accept your first pass at building queries or the data they pull. Be prepared to conduct constant updates

Own your insights. Ideally you will be the one presenting this information and you have to feel comfortable enough with it to defend your conclusions, usually off the top of your head

Conduct manual research. Social listening tools are far from perfect or even precise. While they may offer up the initial data, it is best to supplement with other relevant info

Provide concise conclusions. Always focus on the key takeaways and actionable information for your client, since this often the most valuable part of social research.

Determine trends. Knowing the latest about a brand and/or category will help you provide the most useful conclusions and demonstrate that you are a subject matter expert

Questions?