How can brands "listen in" on social media chatter and learn about customers?

CHICAGO, Sept. 2, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- New research from the Journal of Marketing Research suggests social media data provides an early indicator of brand health, mirroring the results from more expensive and time consuming brand tracking studies.

Professors David A. Schweidel from Emory University and Wendy W. Moe from the University of Maryland compare social media data and metrics with traditional brand tracking surveys.  Their model provides a measure of brand health, as well as diagnostic metrics of brand attributes.  Using social media data related to an enterprise software brand, they show how their brand measure can serve as a leading indicator of customer satisfaction measures obtained from brand tracking surveys.

The analysis appears in a recent issue of the American Marketing Association's Journal of Marketing Research.  Central to their model is recognizing that opinions posted by customers online are subject to a number of factors that may mask the consumer's true underlying opinion toward the brand.  One such factor is venue choice, as consumers use social media platforms such as blogs and forums for different purposes. Ignoring such differences confounds the consumer's opinion toward the brand with context effects from the social media platform.

The authors also differentiate between opinion toward the brand and opinion toward specific brand attributes.  Most analyses consider only the overall sentiment expressed in a comment and fail to differentiate between underlying brand sentiment and sentiment toward the specific topic featured in the comment.  "For example, consider a customer who loves their Apple device but turns to social media to express concerns about price.  Most text analysis methods would code the comment as negative in sentiment.  However, the poster's overall opinion toward the Apple brand may still be positive," says Schweidel and Moe.  In this article, Schweidel and Moe develop a model that extracts the underlying sentiment that consumers hold toward the brand from social media comments that are confounded by a number of other factors.

Everyone from major corporations and political campaigns to celebrity brands are listening in to what is being said about them on social media. The potential for social media to provide valuable insights is tremendous, but social media analysts need to know how to extract that information from the noisy data generated online.

About the AMA

About the American Marketing Association:
The American Marketing Association (AMA) is the leading professional association for individuals and organizations who are leading the practice, teaching, and development of marketing worldwide. Learn more at ama.org.

Contact: Christopher Bartone – 312.542.9029 – [email protected]

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SOURCE American Marketing Association

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