Posts from — March 2009

“One of these days, your boss will wander into your office and say “I assume you’re keeping track of which brands in our category are using Twitter””.

This is a very real world situation that marketers and marketing researchers will soon find themselves in, according to this post from Tom Cunniff at the iCPG blog.

This applies to social media in general as well.  For broader monitoring, I wanted to build on a social media monitoring approach that I’ve blogged about before and that recently Chris Brogan did a good job outlining as well.

But rather than using Google Blog Search, I’d suggest using the new RSS feed functionality that Google Alerts rolled out a couple of months ago, in order to aggregate the significant amount of online content that exists outside of formal blogs.

1.)  Develop Key Words To Track

This could be a brand name (“Energizer”) or a specific topic “homemade barbecue sauces”.  Start by typing the word or phrase in quotes in Google to see how relevant results are with the phrase.

If your brand name is also a word with multiples meanings such as “Tide”, you may need to add something like the word detergent to keep from capturing conversations on surfing or beach combing.

You can also track:

• A URL for a Website
• A person’s name or online nickname

2.)  Getting the search feeds:

Once you have the keywords, it’s simply a matter of setting up a search feed with different social media monitoring tools.  For the three listed below, that means adding your keywords to their search box and then clicking on the RSS subscription button to get the auto-link:

• Google Alerts – for online news, videos, images, and other sources
• Technorati – for monitoring blog postings
• Twitter Search – for brand chatter on the Twitter micro-blogging platform

3.)  Aggregating Feeds In Google Reader

By collecting these feeds into one folder on Google Reader, you can monitor all your brand related mentions from social media in one convenient place.

Another good aggregation tool would be Friendfeed, especially for those who are trying to distribute their monitored content to a far flung group.

That way you can send your boss the link, and he’ll never even get to ask if you’re on top of social media and your brand.

A great presentation last week by Bill Tancer of Hitwise Intelligence has broken me out of the winter posting doldrums.

His topic on levering search data for consumer insights is one of my key interest areas on the bleeding edge of marketing research, and he did a great job of demonstrating the predictive power of modeling search data trends.

One of his most compelling talking points, reflecting the current state of the economy, showed an updated chart from this older analysis on the correlation of unemployment website visits with actual unemployment claims.

Google has gone here before as well, with their demonstration of the Google Flu Trends application, and how search data can be predictive of CDC confirmation of regional flu outbreaks by a couple of weeks.

Both of these examples illustrate how the modeling of aggregated search queries can be an incredible source of insights into consumer intent.

There are a couple of white space areas for marketing research with search data, and all worthy of further pursuit.  For me these include:

• Analyzing search terms associated with digital marketing campaigns at the metro area level in order to link digital behavior to a store level or DMA based marketing mix model.
• Identifying the most predictive search terms (“grocery coupons”) that best correlate with widely tracked consumer attitude and behavior metrics (Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index) in order to understand where consumer sentiment is heading before the competition does.

For a better understanding of the modeling technique behind Google Flu Trends, download the PDF and Excel files that illustrate their method as it appeared in the February 19th issue of Nature.