The document discusses best practices for using social media to gain consumer insights. It outlines a 4-step process: 1) Define objectives, 2) Identify relevant social media sources, 3) Collect and structure information for analysis, 4) Create operational reporting. Key points include determining stakeholder voices and influence, validating relevant conversations, structuring data through clustering and human validation, and designing deliverables like trend reports and in-depth qualitative analyses. The methodology mirrors traditional research but adapts to online conversations.

1. How to get consumer insight
from social media?
Methodology and best practices
Insight Show 2010 – Wednesday, June 30th 2010
Nicolas Saintagne
Brand & Corporate Intelligence Director
The power to understand

2. 1. From market research
to conversation research?
www.spotter.com

3. The Cluetrain Manifesto
Happy birthday to you!
• 10 years for a reference book
- Written in 2000 by 4 American experts in digital
marketing and Internet from Harvard's Berkman
Center for Internet & Society
- …a set of 95 theses for all businesses operating
within the newly-connected marketplace
- The first these:
« Markets are conversations. »
leads us to ask ourselves...
« If markets are conversations, is market
research becoming conversations
research ? »
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4. Social media changed everything...
...everybody told you about it!
• S.O.S. Consumers talk to each others!!!
- The will to create and co-create content and to comment existing contents
These n 6
The Internet is enabling
conversations among
human beings that were
simply not possible in the
era of mass media.
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5. Social media changed everything...
...everybody told you about it!
• S.O.S. Consumers talk to each others!!!
- Multiplication of influence and emerging opinions spots!
These n 9
These networked
conversations are enabling
powerful new forms of
social organization and
knowledge exchange to
emerge.
www.spotter.com

6. Social media changed everything...
...everybody told you about it!
• S.O.S. Consumers talk to each others!!!
- Duplication, propagation and sharing of information at an accelerating pace
These n 94
To traditional corporations,
networked conversations
may appear confused, may
sound confusing.
But we are organizing faster
than they are. We have
better tools, more new
ideas, no rules to slow us
down.
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7. Social media changed everything...
...everybody told you about it!
• S.O.S. Consumers talk to each others!!!
- Consumers feel they are taking the power back from brands
These n 83
We want you to take 50
million of us as seriously as
you take one reporter from
The Wall Street Journal.
www.spotter.com

8. …but did they really change EVERYTHING?
What few people told you about...
• You and your consumers still live “IRL”. They keep on...
- Drinking and eating (maybe healthier products)
- Reading the news and watching TV (less offline, more online)
- Purchasing your products (maybe more online)
- Having holidays (more often and less longer)
- Using the Internet (far more with new usages appearing every year)
- Sleep (less and less)
- Etc.
 They live differently but they still live IRL
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9. …but did they really change EVERYTHING?
What few people told you about...
• You and your consumers still live “IRL”. You keep on...
- Having research about them (more and more online)
- Gathering them in focus groups (more and more online)
- Watching them live (more and more online)
- Monitoring and analysing their conversations (more and more I hope)
- Etc.
 You do it differently but you still do it
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10. …but did they really change EVERYTHING?
What few people told you about...
• You and your consumers still live “IRL”
- Your companies, institutions, agencies keep on needing insights from you,f
researchers, to understand their consumers
- Validate their strategies
- Test their products
- Assess their communication efforts
- Etc.
 They ask you to do it differently (faster, cheaper, more targets,
increased ROI) but they still ask you to do it
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11. In the end, do you have to fear online conversations?
Online conversations are not a threat for marketers: those who can
analyse them can get relevant insights on their consumers!
• Get it real, get it right!
- Conversations on the Internet are not an influencer hobby anymore
- More spontaneous, collective and free discourse
- Conversations are plenty, permanent and follow their own course
- A large part of them is about brands and products
 A performing monitoring and analysis system can therefore be a
powerful and added value consumer insight tool
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12. 2. How to build your social
media consumer insight tool?
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13. The 4 steps to a successful project
A process very similar to standard research
• Don’t worry, it is an easy way. All you have to do is:
1. Knowing your objectives
2. Identifying the right source typology
3. Collecting information ready for analysis
4. Building an operational and consistent reporting system
 As for a classical research, methodology and technology have to
comply with your objectives...
But unfortunately, when a monitoring and analysis system is badly
designed, your objectives have to comply with the methodology and
technology you choose
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14. Know your objectives
What do I want to know and to which purpose?
• Buzz, e-reputation, influence: so many words, so few meaning
- Lots of new magic words you don’t really understand: let’s go back to basics!
- What I need to know is:
1. How do my customers and prospects talk about my brand and its competitors
online?  brand image issues
2. How do my customers and prospects use my products and competition
products?  U&A issues
3. Are my customers satisfied with my brand and products?  social CRM
issues
4. How can I offer better products and services to my customers  strategic
planning and innovation issues
5. Do my customers appreciate my last ad/communication campaign  ad
efficiency issues
6. Etc.
www.spotter.com

15. Know your objectives
What do I want to know and to which purpose?
• Who is actually speaking and why should I analyse it?
- When listening to online conversations, you can listen and understand different
stakeholders:
- Your customers and your competitors’ customers
- Your employees and people who could join your company
- Your prospects or the general public talking about your brand and
products
- And also journalists, experts, gurus in specific communities: your digital
opinion leaders
- Etc.
 You need to define the voices you are interested in and how to assess
their actual weight: a sampling logic...
www.spotter.com

16. Identify and score your sources
Defining the best sources to listen to my stakeholder communities
• Do I monitor online media ?
- For a consumer oriented project, journalists’ voice
might not be interesting: in a corporate perspective,
they are
- However, comments made by readers on articles can be
a relevant consumer source
- The collection and filtering methodology has to be
precise: time frame for collection, content relevance, etc.
www.spotter.com

17. Identify and score your sources
Defining the best sources to listen to my stakeholder communities
• Do I monitor blogs?
- Blogs remain appropriate sources especially experts
blogs on products, markets or sectors
- For blogs, a specific work has to be done before
monitoring to define their relevance, their content
quality, their ability to get comments, their number of
followers, their information update frequency
- Here again, comments on initial posts can be monitored
www.spotter.com

18. Identify and score your sources
Defining the best sources to listen to my stakeholder communities
• Do I monitor forums, bulletin boards and consumer
review platforms?
- Far more than blogs, these are crucial consumer
information sources
- They can gather thousands of messages on specific
products which make them really complex to monitor: as
for comments, strict monitoring rules have to be
defined as far as content quality and relevance are
concerned
www.spotter.com

19. Identify and score your sources
Defining the best sources to listen to my stakeholder communities
• Do I monitor video platforms?
- The real issue is in fact: can my brand and products get
user generated videos and can videos I post on these
platforms get comments?
- Here the statistics and the content of each video can
be interesting, as well as comments posted (very useful
for ad testing for instance)
www.spotter.com

20. Identify and score your sources
Defining the best sources to listen to my stakeholder communities
• Do I monitor Facebook and other social networks?
- Social networks are at the heart of Internet
consumption for a lot of users (more used than emails
amongst younger audience for instance)
- In that perspective, monitoring them can be as crucial
as monitoring forums
- For ethical reasons, the monitoring has to be limited to
public discourse and communities: public status
updates, public groups and fan pages, etc.
www.spotter.com

21. Identify and score your sources
Defining the best sources to listen to my stakeholder communities
• Do I monitor Twitter ?
- The status update platform is interesting for 3 reasons:
1. Analysing the tweets’s content (for instance in
store instant feedback)
2. Identifying relevant information users tweet and
retweet
3. Being alerted on new topics
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22. Collect ready for analysis information
The structuring issue: from information to analytical data
• Information is one thing. Data definitely another…
- The use of raw monitoring information is limited as far as marketing outputs
are needed: it’s like trying to get relevant insights out of raw quantitative data
or verbatims
- Between collection and analysis, as for a standard research, a process both
technical and human should allow the researcher to:
1. Validate information relevance
2. Structure it in specific clusters
3. Qualify its global meaning
4. Deepen its meaning with qualitative approach
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23. Collect ready for analysis information
Validation of information relevance
• Getting rid of the « noise » in conversations to make sure the analysis focuses
on useful content and to understand who is actually speaking about what
To be kept when focusing on
purchase decision process
To be kept when focusing on
purchase decision process as
well as brand/product image
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24. Collect ready for analysis information
Structuring the information according to a monitoring plan
• A readable structure for accessing, searching and sharing the data with
accurate scenarios for machine clustering assisted by human validation.
de
XXXX
X
X
X de
XXXX
X
X
X
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25. Collect ready for analysis information
Qualifying general meaning of the information
• Tone and sentiment analysis generated via text mining process + human
control and input to understand language specificities and subtleties
Ironic
Mocking
Sarcastic
Very sarcastic
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26. Collect ready for analysis information
Deepen the meaning of information through a qualitative approach
• Same kind of process than in standard qualitative research requiring full involvement
of analyst in the process as well as deep knowledge of project objectives
In that phase, text mining resources are expert analyst tools
Comparison with other
product
Emphasis on brand
Interest in product specs
Appreciation of the product
whereas criticism on the
design
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27. Building an operational and consistent reporting system
Designing and sharing deliverables
• Building operational deliverables to understand complex information: a new
kind of insights requires an understandable and credible delivery format if you
want end users to accept and use it as they do with standard research
• This means that you will have to share your views with end users in order to:
1. Define the right metrics: visibility, impact, brand image, etc.
2. Define the right format: email alerts, trend dashboards, in depth reports, etc.
3. Define the right timing for delivery
www.spotter.com

28. Building an operational and consistent reporting system
Designing and sharing deliverables
• A few output examples
Trend of conversation over time Share of voice(m-1)
BRAND 64% (-)
COMP 1 6% (-)
COMP 2 10% (-)
COMP 3 6% (-)
COMP 4 7% (-)
COMP 5 4% (-)
COMP 6 3% (-)
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29. Building an operational and consistent reporting system
Designing and sharing deliverables
• A few output examples
Conversation about products: Sentiment analysis
Le PRODUIT 1 reste en tête des
BRAND 0,34 produits les plus évoqués sur Internet
avec dans le registre positif beaucoup
COMP 1 0,48 de fans qui déclarent leur amour ou
leur impatience avant de le retrouver:
«verbatims »
COMP 2 -0,26 En négatif, on revient sur PRODUIT 1
comme symbole d’un produit non
COMP 3 0,33 équitable: «verbatims »
Sur les autres PRODUITS, on note les
COMP 4 0,17 évocations positives sur le PRODUIT 2:
«verbatims »
Enfin sur PRODUIT 3, est abordée la
COMP 5 0,65 campagne de publicité « CAMPAGNE
1 »: «verbatims »
COMP 6 0,57
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30. Building an operational and consistent reporting system
Designing and sharing deliverables
• A few output examples
In depth qualitative analysis
 Les rapports hiérarchiques sont jugés comme très autoritaires et sans compassion. L’affaire de XXXX participe
de cette perception:
« Bon à savoir: à XXXX, on est payé - mal - à être l'esclave de ses chefs. » Employé – Post - plumedesanges.over-blog.com – 28/05/09
« Peu importe le fait de ne pas être apprécié, un directeur n'a pas à te parler ainsi, c'est absolument inadmissible, comment tu veux motiver les équipes dans ces
conditions la... et même.. est-ce que le directeur qui t'a dit ça s'est mis à ta place et aurait aimé qu'on lui parle ainsi ? » Employé – Commentaire - forum XXXX –
08/07/09
« Moi ca fait 8 mois que j'y suis on me crie toujours autant dessus et pas seulement le directeur mais aussi quelques collègues qui je crois ne m'apprécient pas tellement
mais je ne suis pas là pour faire copine copine mais pour faire mon boulot mais qu'est-ce que ca fout une mauvaise ambiance! » Employé – Commentaire - forum XXXX
– 08/07/09
 A contrario, les évocations de rapports francs et amicaux entre employés sont très nombreuses:
«C'est vraiment un bon moment à passer avec les membres de l'équipe de gestion. Des bon délire "» Employé – Commentaire - forum XXXX – 08/07/09
« On rit beaucoup aussi, en se disant que pas marrant tous les jours d'être caissière, certes, mais que parfois, elles doivent bien rigoler quand même. Comme nous chez
XXXX, finalement » Employé – Post- paperblog.fr – 29/06/09
 Entre employés, on constate l’expression d’un lien qui se crée dans et face à des conditions de travail
difficiles. Le paradoxe relationnel direction/collègues s’exprime d’une double manière: avant tout par la
« mise à distance » de ceux qui évoluent, choisissent de le faire et adhérent aux valeurs managériales
afférentes sur lesquels l’équipier occasionnel ne veut pas se projeter. Dans quelque cas aussi, ce
paradoxe découle d’une évolution de carrière d’un collègue qui le fait passer d’un statut « ami » à un
statut « ennemi ».
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31. 3. As a conclusion
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32. As a conclusion
An Internet monitoring and analysis consumer insight
project can be useful because...
- …you need to keep track of your customers and be where they are
and talk
- …you can access a fully new information that could be complex or
costly to access with standard MR methodologies
- …you can listen and learn to optimize your marketing decisions with a
special focus on digital activities
www.spotter.com

33. As a conclusion
An Internet monitoring and analysis consumer insight
project is successful when...
- …you control its perimeter: objectives, sources and needs for analytics
- …you go beyond monitoring: don’t simply hear and know, listen and learn
- ...you correctly evaluate the importance of human work required
- …you make it collaborative: by sharing objectives, deliverables issues in
order to trigger interest for this new consumer insight information
- …you have an operational use of data: the most beautiful mapping or the
most powerful automatic reporting tool don’t bring value if they don’t
answer your key questions
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