Tag Archives: Facebook

End of the rise of social media? What about social media research?

Posted on by
Reply

Social media is still on the rise. Large networks, especially Facebook, increase not only their reach, most users use the site also more intense the longer they are members. These are findings from a recent research report by Gartner. But the report shows more: 

Gartner surveyed 6.295 people aged 13-74 in eleven different marketsbetween December 2010 and January 2011 .37 percent of respondents - most of them from young target groups - stated that they use their favorite social network more intense than at the beginning of their membership.

However, in some markets there seems to be an end of the rise of social media usage among consumers. Nevertheless, 24 percent said that the intensity of usage has decreased.

The markets where the users are more engaged with social media include, among others, South Korea and Italy, while the users in Brazil and Russia are tending to be less on the social web. The most important argument for reduced use: data protection and privacy.

What does this mean for Social Media Research? 

The same as for Social Media Marketing. That’s easy enough…

It isn’t enough to have a survey or even a poll on Facebook. That’s not how it works. We need innovation, we need inspiration. And we need to know the users of social networks annd their behaviour before we can survey than. Actuality is king as well keeping the attention high in order to use the very short attetion span in social networks. Tht btw is to my point of view one of the omst important reasons why gamification is more than a buzzword in recent times. 

So let’s get creative, and start by attending The Market Research Event 2011 in Florida, hosted by IIRUSA…

Is facebook a research platform? And if so, how could we use it?

Posted on by
1

Stating the obvious social networks have changed communication among people as well as the communication between brands and their users significantly. And it is no secret that facebook is currently the largest social network (and according to this infographic will probably remain No. 1).

In times where communication channels change to that extent, this should however challenge market research. Because we are dependent on the communication between people to learn and explore with our entire tool box of methods, what people think, feel, and how they might behave.

Actually, the conditions for utilizing facebook for market research purposes are very good. Facebook as an internet platform is easy and always accessible from anywhere at any time. It reaches outs in a wide range of target audiences and markets. In most markets the penetration of the regular user base hits high double-digit percentages. And the typical question-answer logic is widespread among the users.

So the question is why this utilization works so poorly and nearly only from the social media monitoring perspective.

I have noticed a number of reasons for that. Here I will focus on three of them.

1. Market research is used to standardization, social networks are not to standardize

One of the main parameters of market research has been the degree of standardization of their tools. The lower the need for adjustment of solutions the higher is the value. This golden rule is now tried to be adopted on social networks and therefore on facebook. This is supposed to be a deadlock, for two reasons.  

First of all, because facebook is continuously changing and evolving, in certain areas with unnoticed changes, it is absurd to create standardized page templates. Requirements, guidelines and other conditions for pages are also changing constantly.
Second, facebook users show a communication behavior on the social network that can be controlled only in very, very few cases by someone in the role of a market researcher. Discussion paths, topics and content areas on the sides are specified, structured and extended by the users themselves,. This works well without a moderator.

2. The possibilities for the use of Facebook in the DIY market research mode are relatively comprehensive (Poll / Questions) and therefore there is no need for “real” market research

Facebook is a platform that’s added values are mainly recognized and exploited by marketing departments. Mechanisms of market research, such as short polls and One-Question Surveys have always been popular within marketing departments to build relationship between brand and users. These modules are no substitute for market research with users of brand’s fan-sites on facebook . Many marketers, however, prefer the use of marketing-oriented marketing research methods on facebook. An understanding of the needs for “real” facebook-market research is only slightly developed.

3. Facebook is confused with community  

Though online research communities are a growing field in innovative research methods, there are clear differences between them and facebook. Facebook or a brand page on Facebook is not per se a research research community. A brand and fan page on Facebook can provide very good services for brand building and communication of brand content. They are very well suited to increase brand loyalty or brand engagement. But it is very difficult to achieve, that the user of a page do not only talk with the brand but talk with each other. Even those brands, which manage to do this, have only limited success in turning this conversation into real relationship

However, there are ways to get quick and easy information about users of facebook brand page. If you agree to the following methodological issues and assumptions, a survey on facebook is very useful:

- The target population is defines as people who have connected to a brand page by the “Like”-button. All results are only valid for this group and generalizations for brand users, potential, etc. should be treated with caution. 

- In order to control the response there is just the number of completed interviews. Since the population of the users is unknown in its structure, the set of participants with regard to their structure cannot be compared with anything. 

There are many use cases for such a research: 

- qualification of existing “fans” in order to learn more about their structure,
- evaluating and optimizing the Facebook pages,
- recruitment of research participants for studies outside of facebook, e.g. online research communities
- for sites with high “fan-numbers” special surveys in target groups which are in general very difficult to reach.

For mein-lesetipp.de, Germany’s leading facebook page dealing with books and reading, we have developed a number of different facebook surveys in the past. 

From our experience, above all you must ensure that the barriers for participation on this surveys are as low as possible. It is true that establishing the look and feel of the facebook environment is very important for users. But it is also true, that the use of applications are barrier, at least because of privacy reasons. Additionally, the use of apps on Facebook, as previously reported here, is below average.

In this research triangle of DIY, Social Media and Community Research, new potential and opportunities for market research occur. These issues are addressed at The Market Research Event in November 2011 in Orlando, Florida. It will be interesting, how our industry will talk about these issues on that conference organized the IIR, USA.

Brand research in social web – what about B2C2C communication?

Posted on by
Reply

Stating the obvious, Facebook’s 714 million unique visitors worldwide in May 2011 (according to comScore) make it the largest social network amongst all. The immense coverage of social networks has animated brands to spread their branded content on social networks in general and specifically on Facebook.

Whereas there are more or less tried and tested instruments to examine coverage, brand exposure and so on for the distribution of branded content and advertising on traditional channels for years, for branded content via Facebook this is not the case.

There is hard evidence for the quantitative assessment of users of brand pages on Facebook (so called “fans“), but almost all relate to the pure number of fans. Coverage is equated with the number of fans in most of the cases.

This is only the first half of the story, as current research shows the effect of branded content on Facebook (such as the study in collaboration by comScore and Facebook, link to the white paper (for free, but you need to register)).

In addition to the fans of brands on Facebook, where marketing as well as market research focus on, the friends of the fans are moving increasingly into the centre of interest. One reason for this is the fact that the number of friends of the fans surpasses the number of brand fans by far across almost all brands (comScore states factor 34 for this relationship for the top 100 U.S. brands on Facebook).

Another reason for paramount importance of friends of the fans can be seen in the fact that over 25% of the time on Facebook is spent with reading, viewing and tracking of the newsfeed (timeline). This area is the part of Facebook where messages of friends are displayed, including their interactions with brands that they are “friends” of. The effect of this pure and additional brand impression is to be evaluated significantly more intense, because impressions don’t come from the brands but from the friends.

Therefore in this case, and unlike to traditional media, it is required to investigate further research in this “B2C2C communication” to understand the modes of causal relationship.

No insight without context!

Posted on by
1

Some time has passed since “contextual insights” was promoted (by Bruce Tempkin and others) as a great opportunity to deliver and activate insights.

Contextual insights – as the opposite of pure statistical analysis – need a broad and deep understanding of our clients’ business. In other words contextual insights are “…observations drawn from data that resonates with an understanding of the business”.

We benefit from contextual insights primarily by understanding the business context for the interpretation and application of the results, combined with adequate data.

I like the idea very much, I think it’s extremely charming. We might need more than data to deliver good insights. We have to dive deep into the client’s business world and understand the context of their needs and opportunities.

But that’s not easy in every case (and btw. that’s the reason why highly specialized companies more often employ their own market researchers instead of commissioning external agencies…)

Social Media Data is a perfect field for contextual data. Although there are tons of data, they weight nothing without appropriate context information.

This is a graph of more than 10,000 Facebook statusmessages, where people have reported that they have separated.

What is clearly missing here are real “contextual insights”, because the data reveal only the “when” and not the “why“. But as a starting point for analysis and as a pool for building hypothesis social media data could be quite interesting.

The question that remains is whether this is already the end of the road or if there is more.

Let’s see what we can learn from the 2011 TMRE11 in November, hosted by IIR USA. There is a nice track called “Activating Insights”. Really looking forward to it

Die alte Schule der Markenberatung weiß auch nicht so genau…

Posted on by
Reply

Die Tage bin ich über diese PR-Studie von Musiol Munzinger Sasserath gestolpert. Hierbei geht es um eine zeitlich begrenzte Untersuchung der Facebook-Aktivitäten relevanter TV-Marken.

Neben ein bisschen deskriptiver Beschreibung der Markenpräsenzen in Facebook (z.B. Alter der Präsenz), finde ich die Aufteilung der Marken in die Vier-Felder-Matrix ganz interessant.

Die Autoren unterscheiden in “Passive Brands”, “Sender Brads”, “Host Brands” und “Friend Brands”. Dabei sind die “Friend Brands” diejenigen, bei denen die Interaktion ernst gemeint ist, wo die Möglichkeit des Kontaktes und de Dialogs ausgeschöpft werden und die Rollenaufgaben der Marke als zuhören, fragen, antworten und interagieren festgelegt sind. Der User wird als Partner geschätzt und ernst genommen.

Meine Hypothese wäre war, dass die Friend Brands am stärksten vertreten sind und auch den größten Zuwachs im Hinblick auf “Fans” haben. Aber das ist nicht der Fall. In Deutschland sind ungefähr 25% der Marken, die auf Facebook präsent sind, “Friend Brands” (z.B. Lindt, FIAT). Und der Fanzuwachs lag (im Messzeitraum) bei 2,0% auf dem niedrigsten Niveau der vier Typen. Zwar liegt die Interaktionsrate mit 4,3% auf hohem Niveau, aber “Host Brands”, die Content und Input über verschiedene Reiter anbieten, aber die Interaktion der Fans nicht weiter anregt und auf ein gemeinsames “Like” beschränken, ist deutlich höher (5,5%).

Was bedeutet das?

Vielleicht, dass bekannte Marlen wie BMW oder Bitburger auf Facebook weniger investieren müssen und deswegen ein Marken-Hosting bei Facebook ausreicht?
Oder, dass klassische TV Marken wie Deutsche Telekom oder Targobank ihrem Sendungsbewusstsein auch im Internet treu bleiben?
Oder, dass ein hoher Facebook-Aufwand bei der Interaktion in keinem guten Verhältnis zum Facebook-Ertrag steht?

Marken, TV und Facebook in Deutschland