To be effective in the digital space, you need market intelligence. At the Digital Camp, we had Richard Wanjohi take us through the session: Research and Market Intelligence; Their use on social media.
Richard works with GFK. He has a career in Marketing with various postings including Market Research, Marketing Consultant for an ecommerce start-up project in East Africa; Editor for leading niche publication Marketing Africa; as well as various Sports Marketing consultancies. Richard Juggles between online publishing for Global Voices Online, Icon Sports Marketing as well as local sports blogs. His blog was Nominated for Best Sports Blog in the BAKE awards 2012.
He started his session by giving us statistics of people who use the internet. “Today, 17% adults globally use the net”, he said. “A sharp contrast to 93% of teens online”, he added. He informed us that 91% of internet users use e-mail 91% use search engines, 67% get news from the internet, 66% visit a government website while 39% read blogs.
“Earned media information should me more trusted and is on top of the game”, he said. He explained that earned media is Consumers recommendations, Journalistic statements on the media, and Consumer opinions posted on forums, social media included.
Talking of the importance of social media analysis, Richard said, “To gather knowledge about share of voice of brands or products and their general perception in the social web”. He also mentioned that Web 2.0 applications make it easier to access other people’s experiences. Content on these platforms, is largely beyond the manufacturer’s control. “Reviews from other users are an influencing factor when buying any type of consumer goods”, he said.
“Social media intelligence is delivering insight from aggregated data, not responding to individual posts”, Richard differentiated. He informed us that companies can use social media as a customer support by responding to people. Social Media Intelligence is however done at a higher level, gathering posts about brands, products and services and aggregating them to help see the whole picture.
“Most IT platforms and services don’t address typical challenges of Social Media Intelligence”, Richard mentioned. “These are basic challenges like irony, sarcasm, slang, relevance, quality and noise”, he continued. Informing us of the complexities of the internet, Richard said, “We also have complex languages seeing that the internet is built on languages and not market borders. These are Multi-language contents examples of which are English, Spanish, Swahili or even Sheng”, he said. He said that experts are needed to deal with those challenges to deliver insights and not only pure Social Media Clipping data.
“Consumer loyalty is declining due to more choices and information”, he gave us an insight. He informed us that in a study carried out, 80% of Consumers were less willing to settle when not satisfied. “As a result, purchase journeys can be extremely complex”, he said. He mentioned that brands need to know what influences consumers´ decision making today as opposed to the 90’s.
Richard mentioned that as bloggers and influencers, we need to make use of analytics on all the social media platforms to get insights on our target audience. The session was technical but informative to all those who attended the Digital camp.
Connect with him at @RWanjohi