Social Media Netnography - by Annelies Verhaeghe
Netnography one
methodology to have a closer look at in this context is social media
netnography or the discipline of analyzing online conversations that consumers
spontaneously share on social media. we were all wildly enthusiastic about
the large amount of consumer opinions that we suddenly had available. For
years, the industry had been suffering from low response rates and troubles in
motivating consumers to give their opinion through traditional research
methods. As a result, many new (more technological driven) players also entered
the research market. I remembered that at a certain moment in time, I counted over
100 providers in this domain during a competitor analysis. It seemed like we
had found the Holy Grail.
And yes,
after each success, we have a period of reflection. Critical questions were
raised about the reliability and validity of social media netnography.
Is sentiment
analysis really reliable?
Is this
representative?
How to
guarantee data quality?
We also saw a
consolidation within the market and a lot of startup companies were integrated
within existing firms. Social media netnography today is becoming more and more
an established methodology with clear guidelines and best practices. One can
however wonder what’s next. Are we there yet? In my opinion, we are
transforming again.
The next big
wave in netnography will be all about consumer insights
Technology is
helping us a great deal when it comes to social media monitoring. However,
consumers only talk about topics online where they are engaged about. Therefore
it remains a great source to detect new consumer needs or to detect the rules
of consumer engagement an sich. Netnography is no longer focusing on data
access. It is focusing on finding new ways of turning information into
insights.
Integration
of social media netnography with other methods will be key
If we want
new & fresh content, we need to know what the client already knows. An
increasing focus will take place on in-company workshops aiming at identifying
current knowledge and assumptions within the company. We will see more
synergies between natural and research communities which will allow us to
understand the ‘why’ behind the conversations. Integration with other data
sources will be equally important. Big data is a popular term (maybe the new
hype) but it definitely could help us give more context to our data source. For
example, many clients use social media netnography to investigate the health of
their digital platform. It is a must in this type of research to link online
conversations also to more behavioral measures like number of likes, number of
visits to the pages, etc. In this context, we will also have an increasing
importance of visual user-generated-content. A picture is a thousand of words
and therefore a great source of providing context.
we will go more and more beyond the data. The real shift will
be one from data to interpretations. The future of netnography is not to
measure what is already there. It is to measure what this information does with
consumers. One can wonder what the point is of measuring the number of brand
mentions on a page if this brand was not even noticed by the consumer. Also, we
only take contributions of active consumers into account whereas we should also
study how we can activate the passive visitors. It is time to shift social
media netnography again.