Here are the slides from a recent presentation we did for the Mid-Atlantic chapter of the Market Research Association.

Essentially, we talked about:

- How social media provides several kinds of data:

• Passive – keyword monitoring, sentiment analysis (positive, negative or neutral brand mentions), website analytics, etc
• Active – collecting fans and followers and seeing who they are and who their connections are (social influence/social capital), A/B testing, focus groups/feedback loops, etc

- Lots of tools available, free (Google Alerts, Twitter search) to expensive (Radian6); Analytics tools (Google Analytics, Omniture, Postrank)

- Examples of research in action:

• Zappos’ GetSatisfaction site – shows sentiment, has good back end data
• MyStarbucksIdea – crowdsourcing ideas – product development, community voting = qualifies the data
• Any user profile can be used to collect lots of new info about people – custom fields, who they are connected with, what groups they are joining

Check out Slide 11 in particular.  We didn’t actually have time to go into the “questions that drive us” because we were busy having a great discussion with the Market Research group and ran out of time, but these are questions we’d like YOU to think about as you’re measuring your social media progress.   Getting the data is easy.  Pretty charts are easy.  Nice spreadsheets are easy.  But what are you going to DO with this data?  Think about not only measuring progress against objectives, but using it for actionable business intelligence.

Have a good examples of how you’re using social data? Let us know, we’re always looking for good case studies or examples to use in our presentations.

3 responses to "Exploring the social web as a research tool"