Netnography.com is the world’s first online community dedicated exclusively to netnography, the ethnographic study of online communities and cultures. (See Lisa Joy Rosner’s post, “Introducing netnography.com!”, here on the NetBase blog.) I’ve just published a post on a Data Analysis exercise from page 122 of Rob Kozinets’ Netnography book. Check it out—and browse content on netnography-related topics—here. Michael Osofsky Ideas still in the works and the latest thinking on Innovation and Netnography from Michael Osofsky, NetBase Chief Innovation Officer.

Today we announced the launch of netnography.com, the first community of its kind for marketing research academics and industry practitioners to discuss and share best practices around this new methodology designed to understand consumers by observing their online conversations. Netnography.com was co-founded by marketing anthropologist and the originator of netnography, Professor Robert Kozinets. The site was created to provide a global community that will drive the awareness, understanding, and innovation of this emerging method. Netnography is a way to conduct [...]

We read in a recent Forbes blog entry that Clinique is using search as a consumer insight tool. This is a great improvement over traditional insight-generation techniques like focus groups because there’s no Hawthorne effect (that is, there’s more transparency). Commenting on the advantages of social media research over traditional methods, Robert Kozinets, author of Netnography—Doing Ethnographic Research Online, and Professor of Marketing at York University’s Schulich School of Business, said: “Traditional research methods like focus groups and surveys ask [...]

Facebook recently celebrated adding their 500 millionth user. Twitter is posting about 65 million tweets each day, or about 750 tweets each second. More than ever before, social media is growing and changing at exponential rates, and researchers and market research professionals are scrambling to process and truly understand such a volume of information. Enter netnography.com, an unprecedented community where market research academics and industry practitioners can share and discuss best practices and approaches for understanding consumers through their online [...]

I’ve had some back trouble in the past year and was thinking about getting a new mattress, so I decided to do a ConsumerBase analysis of the Tempur-Pedic brand. I wanted to see what other people thought of the mattress before I made the purchase. In the past, I would have asked friends, and maybe one person would have owned a Tempur-Pedic and could have told me. Now, with social media, I can basically ask the world and find lots [...]

Today we kick-off a new series of posts on social marketing hosted by Offerpop CMO and Evoke CRM founder Allen Bonde and featuring NetBase Founder and CEO, Jonathan Spier.  In each ‘episode’ we’ll look at a different aspect of how marketers can apply enriched social media understanding to drive product innovation, higher-value conversations, and better campaign performance.  We hope you’ll join in the conversation by submitting your comments and we’ll even feature some of your comments and questions in future [...]

Clients of NetBase often want to know if social media is representative of their consumer base—or, as researchers put it, “Is it rep?” For certain web-based products, that’s a no-brainer—it’s definitely rep. But what about traditional CPG products? For example, a personal electronics manufacturer told me he thought it would be crazy to ignore social media, but that he didn’t think it was rep. His evidence was that offline primary research had identified a certain main issue for his company’s [...]

Summer vacations often herald the beginning of slower business growth, but you wouldn’t know it over here at NetBase! In a record period of company growth, NetBase has added over 50 new customers in 90 days from a diverse group of companies. Having recently launched our social media analytics flagship product, ConsumerBase, to 5 of the top 10 CPG companies, NetBase is now counting even more world-renowned brands among our expanding list of customers, in industries ranging from retail, food [...]

September marks the return of fall, the changing of the leaves, and shorter days. But for football fans, it is a hallmark of one long-awaited event and beloved tradition: the return of Monday Night Football. And here at NetBase, we couldn’t think of a better way to fuel up for football than to cool down with an ice-cold beer. So, what’s the best blend of hops and bitters to generate chatter in the social media world? As always, we turned [...]

I have young kids myself, so I know every family dinnertime is an event that can fall anywhere on the spectrum from something you want to forget as soon as possible to something you and your kids will remember fondly in years to come. But that’s my take on it—I wanted to know what the inhabitants of the social media universe are saying, so I used ConsumerBase to do a mini-netnography on dinnertime. This netnography builds on a post about [...]