SOCIAL MEDIA FOR CONSUMER INSIGHT Chapter 9 1-9

Chapter Objectives  Describe the types of data used in social media research  Explain the different methods of qualitative social media research  Discuss the methods and usages of quantitative social media research  Identify common errors and biases associated with social media research 2-9

The Role of Social Media in Research  Marketers rely on several variants of marketing research to make decisions. Options include:  Secondary research – information already collected and available for use.  Primary research – information collected solely for the research purpose at hand. 3-9

Qualitative Social Media Research  Observational Research involves recording behavior or the residual evidence of behavior. 4-9

Qualitative Social Media Research  Ethnographic Research occurs when marketing researchers conduct field research by visiting people’s homes and offices to observe them as they go about everyday tasks.  Netnography is a rapidly growing research methodology that adapts ethnographic research techniques to study the communities that emerge through computer-mediated communications. 5-9

Quantitative Social Media Research  Monitoring and Tracking  Social media monitoring occurs by carefully choosing and searching the appropriate key words and the relevant social communities.  This process answers four basic questions: 1. How many times was the search term found? 2. When was the search term found? 3. Where was the search term found? 4. Who mentioned the search term? 6-9

Quantitative Social Media Research  Sentiment Analysis refers to determining how people think or feel about an object.  The analysis consists of four steps: 1. Fetch, crawl and cleanse. 2. Extract entities of interest. 3. Extract sentiment. 4. Aggregate raw data into a summary. 7-9

Quantitative Social Media Research  The challenges of sentiment analysis  Accuracy in gauging sentiment with automated tools  Cultural factors, linguistic nuances and differing contexts  Defining the sentiment dictionary  Accuracy in the categorical data needed to make better use of data 8-9

Quantitative Social Media Research  Content Analysis is an analysis approach used to identify the presence of concepts and themes within qualitative data sets. Click here to read more about Dove’s use of social media mining 9-9

Caution! Research Errors and Biases  Coverage and Sampling Errors  Coverage error is the result of a failure to cover all components of a population being studied.  Sampling error is the result of collecting data from only a subset, rather than all, of the members of the sampling frame; it heightens the chance that the results are wrong. 10-9

Caution! Research Errors and Biases  Nonresponse Bias  Nonresponse error is the potential that those units not included in the final sample are significantly different from those that were. 12-9

Caution! Research Errors and Biases  Providers of Social Media Monitoring and Analytics Services  Radian 6  ScoutLabs  Syusomos 13-9

Primary Social Media Research  The possible approaches to collecting primary data in social spaces include the use of consumer diaries, interviews and focus groups, surveys, and experiments. 14-9