Social Media Insight & Analysis: The Next Wave of Market Research

Your business stakeholders are dealing with unpredictable conditions. They can’t always wait for months for the results of a study. You need a better way to understand your current and future markets in near real-time and get answers quickly.

Fortunately, market researchers now have access to the largest repository of customer behavior ever created: the Social Web. People around the globe are sharing their opinions, emotions, and behaviors at an astonishing rate—millions of posts per hour. Twitter alone has more than 250 million tweets per day, and Facebook has passed the 800 million user mark.

The bad news is that a large fraction of this commentary is not useful. Furthermore, sentiment analysis can be tough when you take into account the complexities of language, slang, misspellings, and sarcasm. Without an efficient way to filter out irrelevant information and structure the remaining information into meaningful categories, reaching actionable conclusions is an elusive goal.

NetBase: The Fastest, Most Reliable Path to Understanding Customers Online 

NetBase Social Insight & Analysis solutions give market researchers a fast, reliable way to understand customers, analyze and compare their passion, and generate deep insights that answer “why” questions.

With NetBase solutions, market researchers can:

• Supplement traditional research activities with social media market research. With NetBase, you have a less-expensive, highly effective alternative and/or complement to focus groups, interviews, customer surveys, and other traditional research methods. You also have a global sampling at your fingertips—without leaving your desk.
• Adopt netnography.  Netnography, according to Robert Kozinets, is “a form of ethnographic research adapted to the unique contingencies of various types of computer-mediated social interaction.” Netnography brings significant benefits to researchers in terms of speed, simplicity, and lower costs. To learn more about netnography, we invite you to join in the conversation on www.netnography.com, an online community that serves to drive awareness, understanding, and innovation in this emerging methodology. You can also watch our Netnography video and read about some recent netnographies that NetBase has conducted, including Peet’s Coffee and Southwest Airlines, on the NetBase blog.
• Identify market trends and “hot topics” months faster and much more accurately than with traditional market research methods. With our Twitter Firehose option, you get real-time access to Twitter’s complete data stream—more than 250 million tweets per day on average—in addition to millions of other sources.
• Quantify passion. NetBase uses high-precision measures across a spectrum of emotions—love, like, dislike and hate—to capture customers’ emotional involvement with a brand or product. It’s the first solution that makes it possible to measure passion on a large scale.
• Get a quick read on the numerous “why” questions that companies previously could not afford to research.
• Integrate market research better with corporate decision-making processes, responding to market conditions proactively instead of waiting for brand manager requests. NetBase solutions continuously surface net sentiment and current conversation drivers in social media, so that you know when your company needs to act.

NetBase brings value to your business:

• Get answers more frequently and faster. Traditional research typically takes a minimum of six to eight weeks, while first-generation approaches to social media analysis typically take up to four weeks. NetBase clients have been able to get the answers they need in a matter of days.
• Do more with your existing budget and resources. NetBase solutions automate the process of normalizing and structuring social media commentary. Instead of manually categorizing thousands of comments, your analyst can focus on finding meaning in the data and making insights actionable.
• Find answers to questions that you could not previously research. Every business has a set of nagging “why” questions for which they cannot justify the spending required for traditional research. NetBase gives you a quick way to get those answers.

Can your company benefit from understanding the social voice? Contact us to learn more.