Good entrepreneurs find information and inspiration all around them, not just informal, topic-specific reports. They’re curious and are able to draw connections between seemingly disparate things.
We love digging into both structured and unstructured data to uncover insights. If there’s an insight, it doesn’t matter if it came from a webcam interview or a syndicated report, it’s an insight and we’ll run with it. Social media continues to be a source of deep insights that inform our clients’ business decisions because of the growing amount of user-generated content. We use social media data for a variety of things, one of which is Social Media Ethnography.
We’re giving a sneak peek to our Guide for Entrepreneurial Learning, check out TGG’s Free Social Media Ethnography Toolkit. The toolkit is part of the module on Building Customer Empathy and outlines TGG’s SME process and recommended social media sources so that you can get answers immediately and, even better, in consumer voice. Download toolkit >>>
What is Social Media Ethnography? It’s the distillation of thousands of digital artifacts into key insights for your brand or category, based on understanding human behavior, unmet needs, desires and feelings as evidenced in publicly available social media data.
How we conduct Social Media Ethnography. We’re not talking about the kind of social media research that delivers a report of sentiment or other metrics. Those reports can be helpful in a very limited set of situations. Instead, we’re talking about looking at thousands of digital artifacts that when viewed as a set present tacit insights. Dealing with this unstructured data takes time and the brain of a researcher and strategist.
The benefits of Social Media Ethnography. Compared to recruited research methods, where we ask the questions, social media ethnography has a variety of benefits that make it a smart and scrappy research choice:
It can be implemented on-demand which yields relevant historical and up-to-the-minute consumer insights. It is a tool as dynamic as the content and acumen it yields. In a fluid global environment, Social Media Ethnography can be implemented and continually tweaked even as the research is being conducted. And often research findings can lead to additional paths to pursue the research journey.
Objectives that Social Media Ethnography solves for. These are the objectives that we most often use Social Media Ethnography to understand, at the brand and/or category level:
We did a quick and scrappy SME in just a few minutes (March 23, 2020) and looked at consumer sentiments on working from home and WFH and social distancing. Limiting our search to a window of just a few hours, we uncovered these, behaviors, workarounds, pain points, and delighters:
And, we took a swift look at what people were saying in March of 2019 about plant-based trends:
We’ve used social media research to inform concept development, inform 360-degree landscape assessments, product naming, and numerous innovation projects. It aids in the product development cycle at a variety of stages.
Curious if social media ethnography would be a good fit for your objectives? Drop us a line, we’d love to take a look at your objectives and roll up our sleeves in social media to see if that’s the right solution.
We’re giving a sneak peek to our Guide for Entrepreneurial Learning, check out TGG’s Free Social Media Ethnography Toolkit. The toolkit is part of the module on Building Customer Empathy and outlines TGG’s SME process and recommended social media sources so that you can get answers immediately and, even better, in consumer voice. Download toolkit >>>
