Category Archives: Research

Social Media Monitoring or Social Media Research?

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It’s a question that comes up a lot with new or prospective clients – what is the difference and value of social media research in regards to social media monitoring. It’s a good question. The answer is “both” are critical. Here’s our take on why and the difference.

If you’re looking to develop a social media strategy, then you need to “listen” before you develop a strategy and listen before you actually engage. This is where the “social media research” aspect comes into play. By conducting the research into social media first, you’ll understand a) if there is any conversation about you taking place, b) what is being said, c) where it is taking place and c) who is talking about your company or organization. This initial research provides the key insights you’ll need to make effective business decisions.

In developing a social media strategy, the questions you need answered are those in the above paragraph. Once those questions are answered, you can then determine a) should I be engaged in social media and if so, to what degree? b) Which channels should I be focusing my resources on, c) what kind of resources do I need and what are the associated costs, d) what kind of content will my audience respond to (e.g. video, text, audio, images) and e) what do I then need to monitor, how often and what tools are best?

At MediaBadger, we come in at the first part- the social media research. From the results of our research, we can recommend the best tools to use for social media monitoring, how often and where to monitor in line with your budget and available resources. Hiring a social media research firm is a critical part to your overall online marketing strategy. Such research can identify keywords for search engine optimization, social media optimization, Web design issues (i.e. User Interface Design), nature and form of content and what business units may be most impacted by social media.

I’ll note that one constant complaint amongst our clients is that they hire a 20-something MBA or grad student to do the initial “listening” but the results are tepid at best. That’s because they are missing the point and the target audience. If you still think social media is not for kids, you’re completely missing your target audience – to the detriment of your bottom line. While MBA’s and PR degrees or diplomas are incredibly valuable, they do not make up for real-world or industry business experience. Such experience is critical to being able to understand the “data” to turn it into useful information that can be acted on to make a positive impact to a business overall or a business unit.

Monitoring comes afterward and is equally important and is often called online reputation management or ORM. We generally do not provide monitoring services. There are a number of tools and services that do that; at the top end is radian6 and the bottom end is WhosTalkin, a free service that offers links but no metrics or sexy graphs. In fact there are over 40 services. Keep in mind though that almost all of them only use a connection to Google, which means serious limitations on what might be found…all miss key hyper-localization services such as Yelp or FourSquare – that’s important if your a very local business. We often help clients find the best monitoring solution for their business, industry and budget. Conversely we offer monthly and quarterly updates – which may be preferred if your engagement level is low and audience participation not on the level of the likes of say Apple, Nike, Adidas or Sony.

So to sum it all up; the research part provides you with the road map of where to go and what to say while the monitoring makes sure your good with your audience for the online reputation management component. Here’s a blog post on SocialMedia Today talking about where monitoring tools fail as well. And here is a good list of monitoring services.

Some Don’t Want Your Opinion

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Social Media consultants and public relations professionals will all tell you one key thing of being involved in social media; be sure to engage if you’re blogging as a company. Allow comments, yes, moderate, but engage. But some don’t or wont. We took a look at who’s blogging but doesn’t really want to allow comments.

We were rather intrigued by the results. We examined 500 corporate blogs and found that 94% of them allow comments and of that 94%, 90% moderated the comments. We then looked to provincial and state governments and found 87% out of 105 blogs allowed comments and 95% of those moderated the comments.

We then looked at the non-profit sector and stumbled across the online sector of Cyburbia least likely to allow comments, even moderated ones…our research lead us to religious groups. Those who could be defined as more “extreme” in either the Christian, Islamic or other religions 98.5% of the time did not allow commenting at all – 600 blogs were analyzed. As religious groups moved more to the centre, we found 73% allowed moderated comments and 6% allowed comments without moderation. We’ll let you put your own interpretation to that.

But in summary we can conclude that businesses generally are looking to engage their audience and are more open. Religious groups that are more moderate will be more open to discussion and contrary opinions but those that are more conservative are more interested in pushing a message and less likely to want to hear contrary opinions. NGO’s and NPO’s also will engage with their audiences.

(Author: G. Crouch)

The Most Negative Channel

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Simply put, we love to gripe. It’s just part of our human condition it would seem. Complaining, venting, whinging, whining…whatever you want to call it. When it comes to social media channels, well, in our research, we see a lot of this negative content. But where do we gripe the most? Online newspaper sites.

Last year we did some research into comments left on newspaper sites. We had delved into over 150,000 comments across 38,000 or so articles. So recently, we decided to look into finding out the most “negative” of social media channels. We took our comment research then looked at 2,500 Facebook fan pages, 1,500 Twitter hashtag topics (ranging from products to services) and the same in Identi.ca and then 1,800 newsgroups and forums.

While plenty of griping can take place in any channel, online newspapers showed 87% overall to have the most negative comments on issues and stories. Channels like microblogs don’t allow for much “discussion” with 140 characters, but often reference articles with extensive commentary.

Why newspapers as “Gripe Central” then? Perhaps because you can say more, perhaps it is more topically focused. In blog posts and newsgroups we noted in prior research that people tend to go “off topic” fairly quickly (less so with blogs where 92.4% of the time they stay focused, but newsgroups digress faster) but comments on newspaper articles stay more topically focused (98.5% of the time). What do you think?

Reading comments on newspaper articles can help “frame” value sets and citizen perceptions (once one excludes those just ranting without adding value or propagating a position or astroturfing) and get a sense of the broader issues. But sadly, it would seem we prefer to gripe. This research reflects US, Canadian and British citizens.

(Author: G. Crouch)

The Evangelical Right & Aid Relief in Fragile Nations

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Over the past few months we’ve undertaken, on our own, a project to map the use of social media by the evangelical right. Part of our research has been how Christian/evangelical non-profit aid groups are engaging in aid delivery in fragile nations and post-crisis states (e.g. Haiti post-earthquake.)

We examined 1,800 blogs and websites of various groups and sub-groups across the United States, Canada and UK. The majority of the evangelical aid groups (78%) come from the United States with the remainder split between Canada (15%) and the UK (7%).
In looking at Haiti, we noted there is little to no recognition of the aid efforts of these groups there by UNOCHA, US, Canadian or British governments. Yet by our estimates these evangelical NPO’s may represent anywhere between 20% to 35% of the relief efforts. These groups also report their accomplishments in Haiti and other countries where they are active. US and Canadian evangelical aid groups tend to focus on Latin American countries and the Caribbean, whereas as UK-based groups are active in Eastern Europe and the Indian sub-continent.
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We suspect that due to their religious affiliation, they tend to be less recognized by agencies like the UN or donor nation funded NPO’s and NGO’s. This is an anecdotal theory only vaguely supported through our research and experience. It is a difficult situation for the UN or similar governmental organizations since this then indicates support for religiously affiliated groups and can lead to host nation conflicts or security threats and diplomatic issues.
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As well, evangelical groups tend to focus on orphanages, water delivery and often include the building of a community centre that will often double as a church (noted from projects listed on blogs and websites.) One may speculate the intended outcome of these projects is to no doubt, improve living conditions (and they do, successfully), but also as recruitment opportunities.
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We do not argue that this is either right or wrong. But such activities by these groups shows they are well organized and highly effective in delivering aid. Projects tend to be very focused and well-funded through church members in the country of origin.
All of this then raises several questions; 1) Should religious groups delivering aid be more officially recognised by the UN or similar governmental agencies? 2) If so, are they then eligible to receive added funding? 3) What are the implications of moves like this?
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Social media technologies offer a unique opportunity to monitor and understand the activities of these groups, their key messaging objectives and where they are delivering aid – certainly information that could better aid organizations like the UN in understanding where aid is being delivered since these organizations rarely tend to engage in communication with the UN or donor governments, except indirectly.

Social Media & Business Use in Atlantic Canada Update

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Citizen or “netizen” use of social media technologies in Atlantic Canada is fairly high at around 78% of the online population. So what about business use? We monitor such activity on an ongoing basis in Atlantic Canada, UK and Northeastern US. So here’s a quick update on usage in Atlantic Canada this year.

Trend: While we’ve seen a 32% increase in businesses using social media in Atlantic Canada this year over 2009, what we’ve really noticed is “individual use”, that is, professionals, use social media more than a “business entity.” We define a business entity as a company that has a presence in a social media channel.

Professional Usage: Professionals use of social media tools is up 48% over 2009. The most popular business social media tool in Atlantic Canada is LinkedIn followed by Plaxo. eCademy and FastPitch are distant third and fourth respectively. We also note that “knowledge workers” or “white collar” professions are more active than “blue collar” or “skilled trades”. Knowledge workers dominate this space for business use. The top professions using business social networking tools are; 1) marketing, 2) public relations, 3) insurance/finance, 4) real-estate and 5) technology.

Business Usage: Businesses are increasing their usage of social media tools, mostly for marketing messages. The most popular channels for businesses in Atlantic Canada are LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and blogging. The most popular blogging platform is WordPress followed by blogger.

We do note that although blogging is up 21% over 2009, businesses will average 1 blog post per month only. In 67% of the instances where we looked at a business blog, the blog design did not match their website design or corporate branding. This can lead to prospective mistrust amongst potential customers and purchase dissonance.

Conclusion: We forecast growth in use of social media by businesses this year and are seeing slightly higher use than we expected. We do note that businesses tend to have one person who engages the most with social technologies. We saw that 43% of businesses that use social media have sales professionals as their front while 40% were marketing and the remaining 17% were public relations/communications professionals.

Methodology: We monitor 1,500 business domains across Atlantic Canada (similar and scaled to population in UK and NE USA) with our crawler then running search intervals every month. Data is then compiled through our Artificial Intelligence Engine and reviewed by two analysts. We combine automated and physical research and analysis. We began benchmarking in 2008 and now have two years of statistical data on usage in these regions.