Social Monitoring Creates Superior Information

In yesterday’s  AdWeek article “’09′s Most Talked-About Brand: Microsoft” Elaine Wong ranks the most talked about brands for 2009. An amazing list with a very close client of VML and mine, Microsoft leading the way. However, the information and methodology that was described is what drew my attention more than the content. Simply by looking at the graph below, we can see many different things. We not only get a list of the most talked about brands, but we can also see the number of posts and articles written about the respective brand, the positive tonality about the discussions online (positive discussions v. negative), and the Buzz ranking of each company. It’s simply a great use of brand monitoring tools (ie. Spiral16, Radian6, VML’s SEER) for data collection and utilization.

After reading the article and seeing the data, I began to wonder what this list might have looked like 5 years ago. So, after a quick Bing search, I found an article called “2005 Reader’s Choice Awards” on BrandChannel, which ranks the most popular brands for 2005.  As you can see from the list below, there are some similarities in the brands list, but the amount of detail about each brand and the methodologies behind the information is what I was looking for. The rankings below were based on over 2500 global participants who were polled online with various questions about the most popular brands. While this type of methodology has worked for years and years, there are a couple flaws in this strategy.

While comparing the 2009 and 2005 lists we can identify two major characteristics that have increased the probability of correctness and enhanced the amount of information.  They are:

Type of Respondents: There is a good chance that the respondents to the polling strategy in the 2005 ranking are not a direct depiction of the total marketplace. Whereas, in the 2009 ranking, we are using “real” conversations and discussions happening already online utilizing brand monitoring tools. This type of information mimics real life conversations and is a better description of the total marketplace opinion and sentiment towards a brand.

Where Conversations Are Truly Happening: In the 2005 ranking, we are asking respondents to go to a site to vote or capture people’s votes when on a particular site. The information gained from this could be skewed through the speed at which the respondents answer the polls or the types of people that visit these sites, as mentioned above. However, in the 2009 ranking, we are simply monitoring the actual conversations that already happening, without requiring any respondents to answer any polls. This strategy captures truer information and produces more relevant results.

Comparing these two rankings from, we see a great movement in the quality of information as well as the amount of data that we can capture. The discussions and conversations that are now happening online are closely mimicking real life only, in the online world, it’s trackable. With brand monitoring tools, we can monitor these real life conversations, with little to no influence on our parts.

Takeaway

Using brand monitoring tools, we can take a snapshot of what is happening in the online world. We can get a better understanding of the sentiment towards our company, products, brands, etc. as well as our competition and industry. This “real life” data gives us a better understanding of the wants and needs or our customers, without any influence from us. With this information, we can create a better social strategy and engage with our customers correctly in the social sphere. So, instead of using the now archaic strategies of polling respondents to gather information, why not monitor the crowd with one of the many brand monitoring tools available today?