And I love the tag: Forge Brilliance. Make it count. BlissDom 2012!

Join me!

~Wendy

Blog community provider BlogFrog surveyed female bloggers in the US to discover what kinds of partnerships with brands were more desirable and how women bloggers thought brand relationships should work. About three-quarters of those surveyed were moms; eMarketer estimates 4 million mothers in the US will write a blog at least monthly this year.

source: eMarketer

Read the full article here.

I’m a traditional kind of girl. I love family holidays and love entertaining. So Passover provides the perfect canvas for me.

And did I mention that I love matzo ball soup? Love!

But lately, I’ve been thinking about the real meaning of the holiday.

• The exodus: the march to freedom.
• The plagues: the obstacles to overcome.
• The symbols: remembering and learning from the past.

And I’ve been thinking about how these themes relate to running a business.

Read on. (please?)

Social Media Monitoring is all the buzz. There are some amazing tools out there with price tags that run the gamut. There are few that provide interesting results. And while we hate to be the bearers of bad news, none is good enough on its own.

Just add thinking

Social monitoring tools (and even manual searching) provide you with results based on your query. Once you clean for spam and relevance, you have great fodder for insight, right?

Well, wait a second there bucko. Who decided on the query? What was it based on? Is it thorough? Too broad? Biased by the query creator?

Unless you’re really different than most, the answer is that the query might not cut the mustard. (We both hate mustard, by the way.)
What to consider?

Language and sources

• Does your query language mesh with your consumers’ language? Or is it industry language?
• Have you done broad searching and reading to test some broader concepts and language? Are there additional keywords and concepts that might be in the conversation?
• Are there consistent irrelevant results that you can exclude by changing your queries?
• Are there sources that your system of choice does not cover well? Can you add them?

The tools

Do you have the right tool for you? While we love so many of the tools out there, we contend that each is best at something. Is that something what you care about most? Text analytics for theme analysis? Categorization of like results? Filtering by learning your preferences? It’s also interesting (to geeks like us) to note that while there is duplication of results between various tools, each tool does bring in results that others don’t. Does that mean you should use more than one tool? Perhaps. It depends on what you’re trying to capture.

Are you getting too many results to find meaning in them? Perhaps smaller query sets, but more of them, would provide easier access to trends and knowledge.

Have you tried your searches with other tools? Experimented with broad concepts in free tools to help inform your ongoing strategy?

You might ask what the best tools are. We have opinions, but haven’t tried all of the several hundred choices out there. (But we’ve tried a lot!) Though we don’t believe we’ve yet read the perfect article that describes what we think are the best, here is a link to a search showing results that you’ll find useful. And this Forrester report from 3rd quarter might be a good nighttime read.

The hardest part for many to understand at the onset of a monitoring or listening program is that while technology is wonderful and has taken incredible strides that were beyond our imaginations when we started doing monitoring by hand over seven years ago, no tool can give you what you need without human intervention, tuning, and regular attention. We talk to people in the industry all the time and have never gotten disagreement on this. But yet, many expect to plug and play. Sadly, it’s not reality.
Is this providing actionable learning?

It all starts with your goals. What is it you want out of the monitoring equation? There’s oh so very much you can discover once you start digging. But what you find and what you find relevant to your ultimate goals might well be two very different things.

So, that’s where you start – with your goals. What are your monitoring goals?

• Are you monitoring your brand to be able to provide great customer service?
• Are you monitoring and gathering intelligence for new business prospecting purposes?
• Are you looking to gain insight into consumers’ language and thoughts?
• Are you monitoring for competitive analysis purposes?
• Are you monitoring for every day brand awareness and mentions, so that you can potentially get out in front of any potential crises that might occur?
• Are you monitoring a specific campaign to see what kind of results it’s delivering so that you can tweak and modify accordingly?
• Are you monitoring because you care what people think, say or need?

Yes. That last one above, that’s the clincher. The key to success is about so much more than just monitoring the online space for brand mentions. And this is the part that jazzes both of us.

It’s about context

What people are saying in the context of everyday life matters so much – and is so rarely taken into consideration. The morph to social networks and the rapid adoption of social behavior tells us something important. People want to belong. They look for connections, like-mindedness, kinship and the comfortable feeling that comes with being with people they have something in common with.

That’s where so many brands – and monitoring tools – fail. They fail to consider context and how integral it is to the process of even remotely understanding what makes a human being tick – and what might resonate with them. And they fail to understand that without having people as part of the monitoring and analysis process, the results you think you get might not be relevant at all.

When you care about context, and we do, you look beyond the queries, the semantics, the numbers and the results that just deliver brand mentions. You look for patterns. You look for similarities. You look for the little threads that you can weave together that can lead to things you might’ve never considered, were it not for that thread – that pattern. That nugget that you had to dig for, but which, once discovered, makes all the sense in the world.

Humans comprise the social landscape. And humans – not algorithms – are what ultimately make the process that is social media monitoring and intelligence gathering valuable. Or not. Want to use social media monitoring and really get great value out of it? It’s really ridiculously easy.

Here’s our advice

Include humans in the process. Data in and of itself, without interpretation and analysis of people who are looking for the right things, isn’t really all that valuable. Believe it.

Focus less on the tools than on the people. People are driving the data. Pay attention to what they say, where they say it, and a myriad of other things. Context is infinitely more important than ever.

Take what you discover, from looking at the data, at the context in which the data was discovered and the nuances of those conversations — and make that the basis of your analysis — not numbers. Pay attention to the people, the patterns and the little details. Care enough to listen to what they are telling you.

This isn’t groundbreaking, revolutionary thinking, people. It’s the same thing we learned from our teachers, from the earliest days of the educational process on — listening is key. Paying attention is key.

When brands think less about what they’ll do, produce, provide, etc., For people and more about what they’ll do as the result of listening to, engaging with, trading ideas with and putting people and data into context, we’ll naturally see better relationships, better ideas and, finally, better products and services.

So there you have it. Should you use monitoring tools to monitor the Internet for brand mentions? Absolutely? Are some tools better than others? Sure – it depends on what you’re looking for and your budget allocation.

But the real secret sauce – make sure you integrate humans and human analyses – along with the context of online conversations – into the equation. Then, and only then, will you really be positioned to do things that matter with the information, patterns, feedback, thoughts and ideas that have come about as a result.

This post is written by Wendy Goldman Scherer of The Social Studies Group and Shelly Kramer of V3 Integrated Marketing.

Wendy Goldman Scherer is a partner of The Social Studies Group, a social media research firm she founded in 1996. They provide primary research and geographic information services, news aggregation and monitoring. What Wendy loves most is social media research. Her focus for clients for many years has been on monitoring, reporting, building custom knowledge dashboards and virtual ethnography reporting.

Shelly Kramer is the CEO of V3 Integrated Marketing, a full service digital communications agency. She is a marketer, strategist, content creator, speaker and social media savvy geek focused on new media and all forms of digital comms and marketing. To the astonishment of her many mathematics professors, she’s also become partial to stats, numbers, analyses and measurement of all kinds.

We are fortunate to know and sometimes collaborate with Wendy Goldman Scherer of Scherer Cybrarian and The Social Studies Group.  Wendy recognized the need for concise, actionable research early on in her career as a  strategist in a large advertising agency. And she found her love of the online world early, also –  back in the mid‐eighties. There were no graphic user interfaces yet – meaning there was only text online and you even had to know commands. Can you say ‘geek’?

She founded Scherer Cybrarian to marry the two – using online databases and search prowess to deliver great knowledge documents. The firm grew to include primary research and more and more social media research. The social media research practice continued to advance and grow until it became evident that it could stand firmly on its own. As a result, The Social Studies Group has become a vibrant company growing and creatively expanding as technology and client needs change.

Wendy works with a team of analysts who love their work as much as she does – and that’s a lot.  Clients include numerous respected global brands across virtually all industry categories.  Wendy is an accomplished speaker and guest lecturer, having held presentations, webinars, and lessons for many corporate and nonprofit meetings and university graduate programs.

We talked with Wendy about the importance of social media monitoring for businesses today and are excited to share some of her brainpower with you.

Question:  Why do you think using tools to monitor the social media “space” is important for businesses today?

The great thing about the Internet as we know it today is the vast amount of information it makes available to us. The awful thing about the Internet as we know it today is the vast of amount of information it makes available to us. Without good strategies to determine what is important to know and good tools to discover it, it is difficult (if not impossible) to harness the information in any meaningful way.

Question:  What do you see as THE most important benefit for a business when it comes to social media monitoring?

I believe the most important benefit to a good, sound monitoring process is a flow of fresh data. Back in the day (in the 1900s as @andrewscherer likes to say), companies could at best expect to have annual research, customer surveys, and other scheduled or ad-hoc data inputs. Now, we can see a constant flow of this data. It’s truly amazing for research geeks like me. Of course, data in and of itself is not useful. But then, it never was. What can be done with this information in real-time to make product and service improvements, increase customer loyalty, create good will, and affect sales and boost recommendations is literally limited only by one’s imagination.

So to be more concise (not my strongpoint), a constant flow of pointed, actionable data is the most important benefit.

Question: What’s an innovative way that you’ve used social media monitoring tools to benefit your clients?

I’ve been really lucky in that our clients are constantly challenging us to dig deeper, learn more, and find insights in the data. (Woo hoo!) We have done all sorts of innovative things (pats self on back), but a stand-out application is using monitoring to determine the predominance of leisure activities within mentions of competing brands. The resulting report was quite telling and revealing, among other things, how different segments of our client’s brand (and competing brands’) target audiences were participating on different platforms. Imagine how different the social media strategy that was borne from this research was, as opposed to how it might have been had the client assumed all segments behaved similarly.

Question:  What is the future – is monitoring just a fad that a few businesses think is important, or is it something that’s destined to become a pillar of good business practices?

Oh, the future. I surely don’t believe that monitoring is a fad. Monitoring will be – and is already for some companies – a window into the minds of their consumers. Never before have we had such access to consumer opinion – in such volume and unfettered by analysts (ouch). Since we’re so close to it, it sometimes seems as if everyone is doing it, but this is not the case. Many companies are still trying to figure out the how’s and what’s of monitoring.

The more entrenched brands are working to correlate monitoring data with sales and behavioral data and we believe you’ll be hearing a lot more about that.

Do I think social media monitoring will change from what we now see? Absolutely. The tools will continue to grow in sophistication and ease of use. I expect we’ll see some consolidation in the industry. But fortunately for me, there will always be a need for someone to harness and make sense of the data for actionable insights.

“Over the past year, we’ve collected a rich body of research on these arguable very influential women,” said Social Studies Group analyst and partner, Angela Walseng. “Understanding these mothers, we believe, provides interesting insights into how the green movement is affecting mainstream parenting trends.”

Among the topics covered in the report: eco-moms’ motivations, both the initiating causes as well as the sustaining factors for pursuing a greener lifestyle; education levels and how a more subtle form of activism is occurring in the form of lifestyle choices among the online community of eco-moms.

“One particularly interesting finding in the report relates to what we’re calling the “Green Moment”, a singular – though individual – experience that set half of the women in our survey on their green paths,” said Walseng. “This is particularly interesting considering recent research that indicates that knowledge of green issues isn’t enough trigger a greener lifestyle. The personal, emotional experience is key.”

While the first report used an observational netnography approach, this second report involved surveying 150 of the moms observed during the first report’s research phase.

To download the reports, both “Eco-Moms Revisited”; and its predecessor: “The Green Mom Eco-cosm: A Social Study into their Motivations, Convictions and Influences”; go to www.socialstudiesgroup.com.

About The Social Studies Group
The Social Studies Group (www.socialstudiesgroup.com) is a social media research firm that provides deep analyses of social media conversations to help companies better understand their customers, competitors, markets and industries. Among the companies SSG has provided research for are Blue Bunny, Cabot Cheese, Weight Watchers and Highlights.

Connect with Wendy Scherer on LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/wendyscherer

The report, which is being offered free, is a collaborative project between The Social Studies Group, a consumer research company rooted in social media; and Andrea Learned, a leading Sustainability, Gender, and Consumer Behavior Expert. The study aims to provide insights into how the various “shades” of “green moms” think, and how they are incorporating their “eco-values” into their homes, their lives, their purchasing decisions.

“The women looked at in our study ranged from extremely committed, willing to go to great lengths to cut their families’ consumption, truly making ‘reduce, re-use, re-cycle’ more than just a family mantra, to those whose focus was more on how the environment – think toxins – is impacting their families,” said Angela Walseng, primary author of the report and partner at the Social Studies Group.

The study, based on an examination of self-proclaimed “green moms,” found that three primary categories of eco-conscious mothers emerged: the Super Greens, the Eco-Moderates and the Mainstream Greens. Two distinct profiles are also tucked within these principal categories: the Natural Parenting/ Simple Living Enthusiasts and the Frugal and Greens.  Each of these categories and profiles are examined in the report.

SSG’s methodology involved the creation and subsequent exploration of a universe of self-proclaimed green moms in social media; the firm will continue to track this “eco-cosm” over time.

“This approach allows us to capture attitudes and opinions, emotions. We became, in many ways, immersed in these women’s lives, listening to their concerns about the potential health hazard of certain products, their desire to live more responsibly from an environmental standpoint – and the challenges of doing so with little time and on a budget,” said Walseng.

About The Social Studies Group
The Social Studies Group (www.socialstudiesgroup.com) is a social media research firm that provides deep analyses of social media conversations to help companies better understand their customers, competitors, markets and industries. Among the companies SSG has provided research for are Blue Bunny, Cabot Cheese, Weight Watchers and Highlights.

Connect with Wendy Scherer on LinkedIn:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/wendyscherer

To explore for answers to these questions, we at The Social Studies Group recently turned our attention to one particular, very influential segment of the population. Green moms. As the buying power of women is well-documented, we knew we would be able to discover valuable insights. We partnered with Andrea Learned, a leading gender and sustainability expert to research and produce a report that looked specifically at this group of women. We were curious to determine not only what was influencing their eco-convictions, but how these convictions were influencing how they are managing their households, raising their children, and what they are buying.

While a simple answer would make the job of companies selling everything from cleaning supplies to potato chips to diapers much easier; a simple answer isn’t what we found. But to anyone who has followed conversations on market fragmentation, this should come as no surprise.

We quickly discovered that understanding this market is to appreciate that “green mothers” is an expansive term encompassing women with widely varying degrees of consumption, commitment to green issues, eco-knowledge, and motivation to be green. The women looked at in our study ranged from extremely committed, willing to go to great lengths to cut their families’ consumption, truly making ‘reduce, re-use, re-cycle’ more than just a family mantra, to those whose focus was more on how the environment – think toxins – is impacting their families.

The study, based on an examination of 250 self-proclaimed “green moms” participating in social media, found that three primary categories of eco-conscious mothers emerged: the Super Greens, the Eco-Moderates and the Mainstream Greens. Two distinct profiles are also tucked within these principal categories: the Natural Parenting/ Simple Living Enthusiasts and the Frugal and Greens:

Super Greens – These women are farthest from the mainstream in their lifestyle choices as a result of their commitment to the environment. They are likely to be closely attuned to the politics and research connected with environmental issues, and most concerned with the broader societal implications of their actions. They are also among those most likely to be skeptical of companies marketing green products and services as they are most committed to reducing consumption/waste in general. They are incorporating their eco-convictions more thoroughly into every aspect of their and their families’ lives, closely examining how they live, the choices they make, and the products they use through a green lens. It is many of these women who are assuming the role of consumer watchdog. Once they research a product, its ingredients and the companies behind them—they are sharing what they find online. And mothers, those that identify as green, and oftentimes even those that don’t, are listening to what they have to say.

Eco-Moderates – These women reflect a more receptive, somewhat compromising attitude toward companies and products that being marketed as “green”. They represent a broad group of mothers that is very concerned about the environment, but that is also concerned with balancing the realities of juggling career, family, home and their desire to live a more eco-aware life. They are oftentimes concerned with their family’s consumption, and recognize
excess consumption as being central to the conversation on global sustainability.

Mainstream Greens – This group is more likely to align philosophically with the concept of green consumerism, and are less likely to associate reduced consumption as central to a green lifestyle. While they still shop at big box stores, they are on the lookout for greener versions of the products they already buy. They are focused on making “smarter choices” and often talk of making “baby steps” toward a greener lifestyle.

Natural Parenting/Simple Living Enthusiasts – This niche partially overlaps within the Super Greens and Eco-Moderates. Hallmarks of Natural Parenting include natural childbirth, breastfeeding, cloth diapering and co-sleeping, to name a few. This philosophy strongly incorporates green values, as illustrated in the approach to food which emphasizes homemade, organic meals and locavore tendencies.

Green and Frugals – There is a noted disdain for buying into consumer trends in this niche; a common phrase used within this group:“living within ones means.” These women are not necessarily bargain shoppers, but are focused strongly on saving money as well as the environmental impact of a given product. Green and Frugals are likely to be fastidious about repairing goods, if at all possible, before buying new.

Important to note is that a very common metaphor used among these women is that of a journey to describe their efforts to green their lives. And becoming a mother is precisely what set many of them on this journey.

Why listen to these women?

You can’t afford not to, particularly if you are marketing a product aimed at children, families. While the Super Greens may not be your core audience, they are acting as watchdogs, informing the public of potential dangers and concerns. And while the conversation is notably different among the Mainstream Greens, these women too see purchasing greener products as tied to creating a safer environment for their families. And keeping ones family safe is a desire that is obviously not confined to mothers of a green persuasion.

In terms of getting a handle on what it means to be green, the definition will continue to evolve. We believe, based on our research, that this group of women will be influential in shaping it, particularly considering the role the internet is playing as a consumer research and information tool. They are clearly influencing conversations, opinions, trends; and this influence extends far beyond their peer groups.

The Social Studies Group (www.socialstudiesgroup.com) is a social media research firm that provides deep analyses of social media conversations to help companies better understand their customers, competitors, markets and industries. Among the companies SSG has provided research for are Blue Bunny, Cabot Cheese, Weight Watchers and Highlights. Wendy can be reached at wscherer@socialstudiesgroup.com.

It’s exciting to watch as the value of social media is being revealed in layers:  one layer, the now somewhat wide recognition of the value of monitoring social media as a means to follow what people are saying about ones products and/or brands; another, less common, but gaining in popularity, active participation in social media circles to engage with the public a la Whole Foods and Southwest Airlines on Twitter.

And now, the newest layer: using social media to help guide smart product/service development. A minority of companies (savvy ones, to say the least) are turning to social media as a means to run customer-led innovation initiatives. One of the most talked about examples of the moment is Del Monte’s launch of Pup-Peroni, which is featured in a video case study at Advertising Age. The piece tells of how the company used a collaborative online community to successfully launch the Pup-Peroni dog snacks in six weeks. It’s an excellent example of customer-led innovation played out within social media. Del Monte isn’t the only company using this family of model to make innovation a community exercise that taps into the creativity and user-driven suggestions of its lead customers.

But there’s another angle to using social media to find your lead customers, and to tap into what they have already said – and are saying – to help guide product/service development; to help companies better understand what their – your — customers need. As researchers, what we realize (and have realized through work we are doing for our clients) is that for many, many companies, a mass of information that holds precisely these clues exists online, though often buried in niche communities. Locating these communities and analyzing their conversation for insights that can help guide smarter product/service development is precisely what do for our clients.

At the Social Studies Group, we are digging deeply in exploration of the tastes, ideas and opinions that can help companies guide product/service development. As researchers, we are immersed in this task. And as researchers, we are repeatedly fascinated by what we continue to find.

We recently completed a project for a national consumer foods company in connection with a product that has not been as successful as they had hoped. Our job was to collect information that would help guide the development of a follow-up product. A second assignment saw us collecting consumer opinions around an existing media-related product; the purpose: to help ensure that its next iteration mirrors readers’ interest.

The task of locating these communities and relevant conversations almost always begins with monitoring. For instance, we know first-hand that SM2 holds vast potential for uses far beyond simply gauging the popularity of ones brand. The key is knowing how to design your search in order to arrive at the results that will lead to the most valuable insights. In this case, the information that reveals your customers’ real needs and translates to smarter product/service development.