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How Marketers Are Using Consumer Generated Content and Online Discussion

The New York Times published an article yesterday about how Initiative Media is looking at online discussion to predict "hits" for this falls television line up. The motivation for Initiative Media (and others) to do so is to help media buyers or ad buyers scoop up coveted space during hot new shows.  "Last year, when "Lost" defied all expectations by demonstrating a clatter of attention on the Web, Initiative began questioning whether the passive examination they were doing of the chat sites was simply not a proper way to measure advance audience interest in television shows, said Stacey Lynn Koerner, the executive vice president of global research for the agency, a unit of the Interpublic Group of Companies."

Basically, the network executives expected the show to fail due to the nature of the drama, the 8pm time slot and premiering on a failing network.  "I looked at the data for the show and it was No. 1 in terms of positive buzz," Ms. Koerner said. "I said, 'Ah, shoot, this thing doesn't work.' " - don't you just love this quote...

It is becoming more and more critical for marketing professionals, including advertisers, market researchers, brand managers, communications and CI professionals to look at online discussion or consumer-generated content to capture unfiltered information on consumer behavior, the new focus group if you will.  Here at Cymfony we've been using our automated technology as well as business analysts to monitoring and analyze information from blogs, message boards, chat rooms, etc. for Fortune 1000 clients and talking about the valuable information companies can "discover" for a while.  The intelligence gathered from this new medium can be used in a number of ways depending on what department is using the services.  I thought it would be beneficial to break out the way different marketing functions are using Cymfony's tools to analyze consumer created content or online discussion. This gives a good illustration of how marketers, in general, are using CGM across the board (and many of these overlap by title). For example:

Product or Brand Marketing Managers are monitoring and analyzing blogs, message boards, chat rooms, etc. to:

  1. Monitor customer reactions and feedback to their product or services (in-real time)
  2. Evaluate if their product is serving their customers needs
  3. Ensure that they are building and delivering the right products to target markets
  4. Identify new product ideas, suggestions and product improvements
  5. Identify critical product issues and complaints
  6. Monitor consumer reaction to handling of product issues (customer service)
  7. Learn about new or unplanned uses of their product or service
  8. Specifically - around a product launch, clients are monitoring and analyzing consumer and media buzz before, during and after a product launch to assess the performance of a marketing and PR campaign
  9. To be alerted to potential launch issues, product-related or messaging-related issues and to address them before they impact the success of their launch

Communications/PR Professionals or Marketing - focused on Media Measurement

  1. To easily report results on media coverage and online conversations all within one product - such as downloading graphs and charts to report to senior management
  2. Share media/blog coverage to internal team members
  3. Monitor coverage of competitors
  4. Benchmark and measure coverage
  5. Discover trends, threats and opportunities to help develop their media relations strategy
  6. Understand the number of Internet users viewing discussion related to their company

Competitive Intelligence or Analysis Professionals look at CGM to:

  1. Monitor discussion relating to competitor and competitive products - as well as entire market sector
  2. To identify competitive threats
  3. To identify opportunities through the analysis of discussion relating to competitors
  4. Identify emerging consumer trends and themes within their industry
  5. Monitor media and consumer reaction to products

Marketing professionals responsible for reputation management:

  1. To track how the company, CEO, senior managers, partners or corporate representatives are perceived in the market
  2. Ensure positive perception by fine-tuning their messages
  3. For crisis monitoring - to help circumvent potential  crises or be alerted to them
  4. To identify media or possible blog relations outreach opportunities
  5. Identify key influencers that are having a major impact on the company's reputation
  6. Identify misinformation, rumors or actual issues that are being disseminated online
  7. To identify employees, partners or others who are sharing confidential company info

PR or Marketing professionals responsible for campaign and event analysis:

  1. To immediately find out and compare the results of their message traction around a specific campaign (whether is an print ad, viral ad or TV ad campaign)
  2. To test ideas or campaigns
  3. Measure the success of each campaign or event - by benchmarking messaging, buzz, spokesperson effectiveness, etc. to determine if their budget dollars are worth it for future investment
  4. Identify the use of key messages within consumer discussion
  5. Understand the terminology used by consumers to improve repackage outreach and message development

Market Researchers or Marketers focused on customer behavior analysis

  1. To learn more about their customers preferences including likes, dislikes, emerging trends, opportunities, threats and competitive intelligence (or quite simply understand likes, dislikes, wants, needs, etc. of their customers)
  2. To analyze the effectiveness of marketing ad or messages shaping consumer perception
  3. To identify threats and opportunities to take action to adjust strategy (done in real-time)
  4. To personally go into an application to immediately leverage automated analysis to understand and discover patterns, trends, issues and topics that surface - without having to wait for a report (unless of course they want a report)
  5. Identify key product attributes discussed by consumers

And this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what can be done and what we can learn from consumer created content as well as traditional media.  For instance, the NYTimes article mentioned that Initiative was also monitoring "talent conversations" on the Web, tracking the number of mentions for stars such as Martha Stewart, Geena Davis and Jennifer Love Hewitt which could help indicate if their respective new shows will do well.  This can also been done by using tools such as technorati or icerocket or pubsub.  Cymfony's Dashboard product Digital Consumer Insight (DCI) also provides information on mentions but dives into much deeper analytics and tends to focus on brands rather than entertainment or hollywood. 

Posted by Jim Nail on September 20, 2005 at 11:05 AM | Email this post Permalink

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Great post by Cindy Sullivan at Cymfony on how markets can use blogs and discussion groups. Its very specific - it divides the topics into 6 areas, and lists several approaches in each area. She doesnt discuss using blogs to market, as ... [Read More]

Tracked on Sep 21, 2005 12:24:47 PM

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