Listen to Your Customer Wherever They Are

Research Live

 

FEATURE 17 OCTOBER 2019 - this article also appears in Market Research Society’s Impact Magazine

Jane Bainbridge

Social media means people’s views on brands – from customer service to product design – can be shared in seconds. But marketers must be careful not to assume this is the only valid platform for understanding people’s sentiment. 

 

There’s nothing like a Twitter storm. The indignation of the individual, ideally involving a few carefully crafted sentences, eagerly jumped on by others – perhaps with the benefit of a hashtag – and, before you know it, you have a full-on public relations crisis for a brand comms team to try to avert, calm and resolve.

With social media offering such a public platform, easily shareable and able to rack up ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ in minutes, not just days, it’s not hard to see why companies spend so much time monitoring their online sentiment. Just because social media is easy to measure, however, doesn’t mean it’s the only, or most important, platform for customers’ opinions.

Last year, Kantar signed a partnership deal with social intelligence and analytics firm Engagement Labs with the aim of analysing all aspects of consumers’ conversations – online and offline. The TotalSocial platform collects data from social networks and Kantar carries out continuous surveys of a nat rep sample of the British public, to achieve a more balanced view. Sometimes, online conversations will mirror offline ones, but word of mouth often follows a different trajectory. Both sides matter to businesses, but just paying attention to one can give a skewed picture.

 

Read the full Research Live article, here.

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