Is it rude not to (social) listen?
Lately I’ve been learning about and experimenting with text analytics tools. They are cool and powerful, and may or may not be a must-have for your dashboard, depending on your brand and your consumers.
Programs like Salience, by Lexalytics and Alchemy, by IBM are sort of the base level engines that fuel text analytics. They are natural language processors. You load in a block of text and they spit out a whole slew of analyses of your unstructured data. It’s like word clouds but at a whole new level. These programs can coun words and phrases, classify them as entities and themes, and can take note of the surrounding adjectives to measure sentiment.
The catch phrase often connected to text analytics is social listening. When you start with basic text analytics and add on the act of gathering and organizing all types of mentions, tweets, likes and posts that are happening around your brand, you are fully engaged in social listening.
Is social listening a must-have? On the one hand it does qualify as gathering insights, since insights can come from all types of data, including written and spoken words from focus groups and surveys, numerical sales data and even observational data from ethnography studies. However it doesn’t really replace a traditional marketing research study that’s more about purposefully gathering the specific information needed to quantify an opportunity, identify a key target or find the right positioning.
In the not-so-long term, though, as more and more consumer feedback gets shared out into the cloud, this type of unstructured data will likely become a bigger chunk of the insights pie for brands and companies. It will be increasingly harder to leave unmined.