Thought Leadership: “Analysing Online Discussions”

Tommi Lehtonen, CEO of Whitevector, looks at the challenges facing the social media industry…

‘Social media’ is of course one of the most discussed topics within the communications industry. The term can be used to describe any media form that connects people, and allows participants to engage in some form of dialogue. Mobile phones are social media, so (most obviously) are sites like Facebook and Bebo. There are blogs, and discussion forums, micro-blogs and message boards. In short there’s any number of different ways for people to interact, to discuss, to argue, to be social.

Everybody realises that social media is important, and becoming more so. Users flood to it, relishing the opportunity to share their thoughts, and to comment on other people’s musings. The figures are almost too large to grasp – the estimate for the number of blogs in existence is measured in the hundreds of millions, of which a maximum of around 15-20% are active. The absolute number is increasing; the proportion that is active is decreasing.

This success causes a dilemma for advertisers. On the one hand, any media form that attracts and engages with large numbers of people – especially people who are hard to attract and engage with using other more traditional media forms – is good news. On the other hand, it has to be recognised that one of the main attractions of social media forms to many of those who use them and engage with them so enthusiastically is the absence of commercial messages.

In our experience there still exists some uncertainty regarding how best to measure and analyse social media, which is one reason why the advertising revenue breakthrough for the industry is yet to come. There are a number of companies around offering products and services designed to measure social media.

At Whitevector we spend a great deal of our time around the media agencies; when we ask them to identify the key issues that slow down their widespread adoption of social media, two areas arise ahead of all others: data quality issues (for example coverage estimates, and how best to deal with spam) and confusion in the metrics provided.

Data quality is an issue that has burdened the providers of social media analytics for as long as these type of products and services have been around. The sheer amount of discussion data is overwhelming and the diversity of the data poses great challenges for automatic handling and analysis. Although blogs are often seen as synonymous with social media, it is to be remembered that chat rooms and discussion forums produce more data than blogs.

As product development teams have grown and the techniques they employ continue to evolve, the problems with data quality have naturally decreased, a typical pattern for a new industry.

Confusion around currently used metrics and the absence of a consistent approach slows down the adoption of social media data inside media agencies. It is strange that the various organisations that discuss how best to measure any form of online activity too often bring the debate around to the lowest common denominator of gross numbers of people on a site. The very point that makes social media so potentially attractive to advertisers – the engagement that users demonstrate through the discussions in which they participate – would seem often to be ignored. Furthermore this is not an insurmountable technical problem; at its best a social media analytics product can offer metrics not only for volumes of contributors but also for both net reach and engagement.

The net is that advertisers and their media agencies recognise that social media is important, that it represents a huge area of potential, but that the lack of relevant data and measurement combine with a gut feeling that advertisers using the medium have to tread cautiously to avoid upsetting the very people they wish to engage with. Together these act as a brake on future growth.

Online systems that monitor brand discussions online, such as Whitevector’s Chat Reports can help shine a light into the online world of discussions and debate, a world within which consumers discuss brands. The insights that emerge are valuable indeed, and go far beyond a simple assessment of how many people are talking about which brand, where.

Besides quantitative metrics such as volumes are of course important, not least in the way that they help to contextualise social media forms by allowing for a basic comparison with other media, but they only tell a part of the story. Of greater value is the knowledge that can be gained by listening to customers. In this sense, analysing online brand conversations is not unlike open-ended research, with the insights available falling somewhere between those that might be garnered from a mix of qualitative studies amongst a quantitative audience.

Flexibility is key to any online system. Our experience has been primarily with the media agency community, and has pointed up the importance of allowing the agency to interrogate the data, review the findings, re-interrogate the data looking at it through a different lens, and so on iteratively until the questions posed have been answered.

Agencies are of course charged with placing any communication form into context, which is why we encourage them to see and use Whitevector generated data as just one piece of the jigsaw, as opposed to providing the whole picture. This contextualising of our output has also led us to start to develop reach estimates, and demographic analyses.

Making the best use of social media forms is a challenge. In a strange way, the very word ‘advertising’ is a hindrance. On the one hand we want to ensure that a commercial message is inserted seamlessly and acceptably into the conversations taking place online. On the other hand, we need to recognise that being intrusive, by interrupting what is in effect a conversation is at best rude. Rudeness tends not to translate into positive feelings towards the brand doing the interrupting.

Squaring this circle needs creative talents as well as analytical and data skills. The rewards are there, for those that are able to participate without crassly annoying those very people that we want to feel good about us. Understanding the discussions, appreciating the tone-of-voice and realising that any participation needs to be both relevant to and accepted by those involved can increase the chance of success.

It may seem an obvious point to make, but it is important for any medium not to make the mistake that they exist within a vacuum. No single medium can answer every communication need, and yet it is surprising how often media channels are evaluated using data and analysis that neither plays to their own characteristics nor considers the totality of the options available.

Social media is all about dialogue, about listening and about interpreting what is being said out there. The way in which we measure and analyse the audience contributing to online brand discussions needs to be flexible, contextual and relevant.

Media Playground: www.media-playground.co.uk