One kind of market...

One conversation we often have with people when talking about Tribalytic is about the relationship between Public Relations and Marketing.

People obviously understand that these are closely related.  However, are they best served by different tools?

It’s our belief that the current Social Media Monitoring market is firmly focussed on the area of Public Relations.  Tools that promise “instant alerts”, “engage customers from your dashboard” and “allocate messages to individuals for action” are targeting the PR professional who wants to monitor consumer comment, and engage and support the consumer in their interactions with your brand, (hopefully) generating positive good will.  Of course this is all good stuff and we don’t have a problem with it.

But… Market Research needs a different tool set.  When undertaking market research, it’s the longer term messaging that’s important.  How are people engaging with my brand? What language do they use to talk about it? How do you summarise this quickly? What events triggered brand interactions?  Were they successful or not?  Should I do more of them?

These kinds of questions aren’t directly served by monitoring tools that go ping when a keyword is mentioned, but instead require analytics.  Tribalytic analyses all the users locate within a given market to give a very comprehensive look at what is engaging people.  This is important for a number of reasons:

1. While some monitoring tools do provide basic analytics, they only track a small portion of the available messaging and in fact are self selecting because to monitor you typically narrow your focus with the chosen keywords to exclude unwanted content.  By monitoring all users, we can find interesting relationships NOT evident in small data sets.
2. From a market research perspective, picking apart this noise is actually a useful exercise – what OTHER topics are out there that engage people with my brand keywords?  How do I differentiate and potentially cut through?

A great example is the recent Nestle / Facebook / Greenpeace kerfuffle.  The coverage of this event was firmly engaged around the Public Relations disaster for Nestle (and it clearly was).  But from a Market Research perspective, I’ll bet there are more than a few cool heads in Nestle saying, “yes – we handled this badly, but the longer term trend was a blip in sales and people are back to eating Kit Kats again”.

From a PR perspective, Nestle needed to engage (and did it badly).  From a market research perspective the question is different – how did this really impact the brand, long term sales trends and indeed, the day to day conversation on Twitter.

For example, when people talk about Orangutans do they still mention Kit Kats, or vice versa?  To answer this with a monitoring tool you’d need to track everything both sides of this (Orangutans and Kit Kats) that might be mentioned (probably at a per keyword $ rate).

What do you think?  Do PR and Market Research need different (but perhaps related) tools?  What should a market research tool for Social Media deliver that a pure monitoring tool wouldn’t think to do?

We’ll be back next week to answer the Nestle / Greenpeace question in more detail with Tribalytic as far as Twitter users in Australia are concerned.