A single online review, comment, or even a simple social media post captioned \u201cI love this brand!\u201d can make a world of difference in your brand\u2019s reputation. Learning to listen to consumers as they communicate indirectly through their various social media has become imperative in this age of likes and shares.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That\u2019s where our Brand Fame solution comes in. With a thoughtful balance of AI and human intelligence, it helps you understand what consumers are saying about your brand online. We asked our Global Social Insights Lead, Gilbert Saktoe, who has been working in social insights since 2010, years before Instagram even existed! So, we asked him to shed some light on digital brand health as he knows better than anyone how vital social insights have become in understanding brand perception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A:<\/strong> They say the whole is even greater than the sum of its parts. The parts I like about my work include: (1) working with passionate and smart people (2) helping to grow some of the biggest and most exciting brands in the world (3) our challenger state of mind, where we\u2019re always pushing ourselves and our clients to improve (4) did I already mention the smart and passionate people?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Put these all together and the \u201cwhole\u201d is pretty special.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A:<\/strong> A brand\u2019s narrative is not only controlled by the brand itself, but also its audience. They have a profound impact in the way other consumers see or perceive a brand. They are having conversations about a brand without the brand being present. Businesses should play an important part in their own narrative, and social insights can help with that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On top of that, many companies invest in social media campaigns or influencers, but they don\u2019t actually know what kind of impact it has on their brand. So, you\u2019re not using your budget very effectively if you can\u2019t assess if these marketing activities are successful, and you\u2019re also potentially missing out on opportunities to build a stronger brand online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A:<\/strong> Not always. A lot of our clients have a social listening tool in place, but it may be underleveraged because it\u2019s not actionable or it doesn\u2019t drive impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is because there is a tremendous amount of noise in social media data. And you can\u2019t have actionability if the quality of the data is bad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Take for example hypothetical brand \u201cOscar\u2019s pet food.\u201d You can imagine that during the actual Oscar\u2019s film awards there is a tremendous amount of noise online \u2013 data from social media is flooded with irrelevant content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s why we need to work extra hard to get rid of the noise!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Besides noise, the listening tools in place may not code everything accurately. When you look at a typical social listening tool\u2019s independent results, they express that most topics talked about online have a neutral sentiment. That is because these tools cannot read and distinguish emotions like sarcasm and humor and so cannot categorize topics concretely. You need smart machines supplemented with human intelligence to understand the true voice of your consumer and get to granular learnings that will result in actionable insights!<\/p>\n\n\n\n A:<\/strong>\u00a0Exactly. At Toluna, we are extremely strict with the quality of our data. So, we continue to rely on human intelligence in our analyses across solutions, even though we smartly pair it with various AI tools and methodologies to get the best of both worlds. We understand the need for efficiency and speed for example, which technology obviously facilitates a lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A:<\/strong> I don\u2019t know about that but it is definitely important! To really understand your brand\u2019s health in a holistic way, we look at data from social media and other sources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a fear that combining social, survey, or other brand tracking data might give contradicting insights, and this might make growing your brand more complex. But we should embrace different perspectives because each has their own strength.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To give you an example, a fictional sports drink works toward measuring the success of their brand by conducting a survey. The survey results paint a more held-back picture of overall brand performance. This could be because if you ask the average person about the drink, they might mention that they dislike the taste (\u201cit tastes like cotton candy\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the brand\u2019s digital social media health might have been excellent. This was perhaps because they were killing it with all kinds of activations by portraying a strong, fun, and energetic image. So, their challenge is to bring that online and offline identity together, for example, by innovating the product \u2013 sharing a more connected drinking experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, you really need multiple sources of data to understand your brand\u2019s performance. Not only survey data, but also social data, search statistics, and the more the merrier!<\/p>\n\n\n\nQ: Why is it so important to understand brand health through social media?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Q: Aren\u2019t most brands already using social listening pretty effectively?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Q: Is this why the human element is still important in data analysis?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Q: Are social media insights really the holy grail of brand tracking?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Spectrum of source of insights<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n