Brand Tracking Through Social Media

Abstract:

In this study the effectiveness of brand tracking through social media was studied. This study is of much significance to the brand managers for future application of social media channels.

Social media is centered on communities where users share their opinion and gain others perspective unlike traditional media where the company sends unidirectional messages to the audience. Social media requires the consent of the user and is more acceptable as compared to traditional media which infiltrates the personal space of a person. Social media is basically shared media where brands can simulate discussions at regular intervals but the final result of the discussion can have either positive or negative impact on the brands.

Social media scores in targeting the message to the right audience. It enables marketers to focus on their target segment instead of broadcasting the message to mass audience. The media lays emphasis on engagement with the customer and builds a relationship which is long lasting.

Key Words: Brand Tracking, Social Media, Online Marketing.

Introduction:

Knowledge services are an emerging concept that integrates knowledge management, a knowledge organization, and knowledge markets. Knowledge Services are programs that provide content-based (data, information, knowledge) organizational outputs (e.g., advice, answers, facilitation), to meet external user wants or needs. Knowledge services are delivered through knowledge markets.

There are four types of knowledge services: generate content, develop products, provide assistance, and share solutions. Knowledge services are modeled as a circular value chain comprising nine stages that embed, advance, or extract value from knowledge-based products and services. The stages are: generate, transform, manage, use internally, transfer, enhance, use professionally, use personally, and evaluate. Knowledge services in this company will provide business solutions to the clients. They perform market research for particular clients and analysis of the market to them. Market research is a part of knowledge services which they provide for the clients.

Market Research Industry

Marketing research is the systematic gathering, recording, and analysis of data about issues relating to marketing products and services. The goal of marketing research is to identify and assess how changing elements of the marketing mix impacts customer behavior. The term is commonly interchanged with market research; however, expert practitioners may wish to draw a distinction, in that market research is concerned specifically with markets, while marketing research is concerned specifically about marketing processes.

The task of marketing research is to provide management with relevant, accurate, reliable, valid, and current information. Competitive marketing environment and the ever-increasing costs attributed to poor decision making require that marketing research provide sound information. Sound decisions are not based on gut feeling, intuition, or even pure judgment.

Market research Industry in Present scenario

Emergence of new age sectors like Telecom, Media (Digital), Pharmaceuticals, Insurance is helping the Market Research Industry to climb to new heights with varied analysis of Consumer Insights. Despite slowdown in the past coupled with talent crunch and dog pricing by agencies, the roughly 900 crore Market Research Industry (Excludes KPO) is well poised to take a big leap.

Market Research is changing and that too from its early days of data collection methods to improvised ways of social media research with sophisticated research tools. MR industry is also facing a crunch in having the right kind of people skilled with a good training background to understand the needs of the clients brief. Moreover, today’s most of the research work is being covered with a regular monitoring job like tracking, audience measurement, syndicated studies etc rather than with a specific problem.

Besides the emergence of the improved data collection technique, there was a major rise towards analytics, data-mining and warehousing agencies during the last couple of years. Many emergent sectors like Telecom, Insurance, Retail which has grown phenomenally in the past, need these kinds of data sets to draw strong insights of their consumer behavior towards the services of the same. There were also emerging opportunities like online research tool or business intelligence or MR outsourcing helping the clients to focus on their core competency by getting the right insights of information from their customers and thus increases the value of MR role in the decision making process.

Key Words: Brand Tracking, Social Media, Online Marketing.

Social Media led Market Research

Social media is a media for social interaction using highly accessible and scalable publishing techniques. Social media makes use of internet technologies to enable dialogue among the users. Social media marketing has gained relevance over the past few years due to the increasing popularity of social networking sites like Face-book, Orkut, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.

Social media is centered on communities where users share their opinion and gain others perspective unlike traditional media where the company sends unidirectional messages to the audience. Social requires the consent of the user and is more acceptable as compared to traditional media which infiltrates the personal space of a person. Social media is basically shared media where brands can simulate discussions at regular intervals but the final result of the discussion can have either positive or negative impact on the brands.

The stats of using social media have become huge in recent times. The stats for using social media are given below.

- 12% of respondents check/use Face-book every couple of hours
- 60mm users will be using LinkedIn in recent times
- Total Registered Users for Tagged is 100 Million, USA Monthly Unique Visitors is 6 million, Daily Users: 3.5 million
- The number of U.S. unique users was 50.8%, a sharp drop from 62.1% this year on Twitter Social Networking websites continue to grow on a huge scale with Facebook recently announcing that they have now reached over 400 million worldwide users and Twitter soon to be reaching the benchmark of 50 million tweets per day. Facebook and Twitter also both boasted a triple-digit growth in 2009 with social networking now accounting for 11% of all time spent online.

In addition Nielsen concluded that overall social media sites such as Facebook are now the most common homepages for users and that people now spend the majority of their internet time using social networks or blogs.

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This helps the market research firms concentrating on social media audience to cover more people in fewer amounts of time and cost. This helps to get better opinion than a traditional primary research. This is the advanced form of primary research where we can collect the opinion of the people through online.

Nature of the business

Data IQ

Companies understand that effective management and utilization of data is imperative to maintain competitiveness in today’s business environment. To help clients build a sustainable competitive advantage, in case of EmPower’s Data IQ services help acquire, cleanse, enrich, and maintain data.

Data IQ services enable organizations to generate value from their intellectual and knowledge-based assets.

The Global Listening Model sifts through millions of voices in the Social Media to:

- Listen to relevant content from multitude of blogs, forums, chat rooms and other online content
- Analyze the chatter to segment the audience, their key themes, tone, needs, perception etc.
- Identify the Key Influential Bloggers (KIB) and their points of view
- Understand the KIBs’ Audiences and their relationships with the Influencer
- Provide actionable insights on how to effectively harness the power of this new media and how to influence the influencer and therefore the audience segments.
- Measure the impact of viral Marketing efforts through Social Media
Global Listening Model deliverables include:
- Early warning/alert system to manage brand reputation
- Analysis of the chatter to segment the audience, their key themes, tone, needs, perception, etc.
- Identifying the Key Influential Bloggers (KIB) and their points of view
- Key Influencer Maps
- Identifying the key influencers and their talking points
- Social Media Brand Perception Dashboard by audience segment (e.g. consumer, KOLs, analysts etc.)– weekly/monthly
- Measure effectiveness of Marketing efforts

EmPower’s Methodology and IP

1. Analytics+

Analytics+ uses proprietary methodology to combine the quantitative market trend data from traditional sources with qualitative social media data to provide richer, deeper and holistic insight.

Analytics+ is a unique three-pronged methodology that integrates:

Traditional quantitative research

Qualitative Social Media data

2. SMMART - Social Media Multi-Attribute Rating Tool

SMMART is a proprietary tool that ranks sites based on a set of predetermined parameters such as:

Awareness (or Reach) parameter to showcase popularity of a site in social media Engagement parameters to display involvement of other Websites and visitors and Focus and relevance parameters to display relevance of the site to the project

This tool provides a unique advantage to provide actionable Social Media Insights to their clients.

CERT - Corporate Equity & Reputation Tracker and BERT - Brand Equity & Reputation Tracker

Corporate and Brand Equity are intangible assets that influence customer’s purchasing decisions significantly. CERT & BERT are proprietary tools that enable clients to quantify and track corporate and brand equity and reputation over a period of time. The tools utilize a 360 degree approach of measurement that accounts for customer, employees, media and analyst (experts) perceptions.

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