We discussed the Building Block Questions at the end of last class. This led me to investigate some more ways to identify customer needs. I came across several articles that discussed using social media. There were a few that described the typical use of social meda: data mining user posts. This task had more nuance than I expected. One would need to have several related keyword searches to capture as many similar posts as possible. The results would need to be analyzed and categorized so that the most value possible could be extracted. For example, one article looked at identifying the
"jobs to be done" for those who were saving money for college tuition in an attempt to find new "products" for a financial services company. The author searched Twitter for "college savings", "saving for college", and "pay for college." He collected 150 tweets for each term tried to answer three questions:
- How many contained usable insight?
- What were the common words?
- What was the collective sentiment?
One interesting observation was that many of the results were not from real people, but institutions. As the author stated, "First you need to separate the manufactured marketing tweets from the honest expressions of individuals." Another observation was that social media is used as a forum to vent, which may provide opportunities for innovation, but which may just lead to many honest yet not-so-valuable posts.
Another article, introduced an interesting idea that I've seen in practice during an internship experience. The author discusses applying
social media technologies to employees within an organization. The article reviews insights revealed from a Deloitte Insights report. According to the article, "the report says that enterprises that apply social strategies to their operating models can react more quickly to shifting customer needs, and adapt more fluidly to technological change."
What have your experiences been with social media and product marketing?
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