During a Kantar Twitter Workshop event, Larry Friedman, the Chief Research Officer at TNS, shared his excitement about the value that social media brings to a market researcher. His view, shared by many of the presenters was that social can be used in predictive models. “There is signal in the noise. You just have to extract it,” he explained. This gives marketers a jump on obtaining market reaction, enabling real-time decisions and adjustments as necessary.
Mr. Friedman’s experience, shared by Visible and our Insights team, emphasizes that meaningful insights come from effective segmentation of social media data. Breaking down the conversation based on key messages, location, type, sentiment, influence, and other enrichments enables you to identify the “signal” that provides intelligence. The social data can also be coupled with other market research and behavioral data to make informed decisions about programs, campaigns, messaging, and products as necessary.
Consensus among the audience also grew that organizations need to build internal expertise, using data scientists, to incorporate social media data into their analysis. Further, recognize that it’s not just about measurement. Effective qualitative assessment helps to reveal the Voice of the Customer, in a less structured, prompted mechanism.
There is truly a lot to be excited about as social becomes a normalized part of the market research process!
Search #kantartweets to pull some on-the-scene tweet perspectives from the audience.
