As part of a new blog series, we’ll be reposting some of the most popular blogs from the last three years. Though much has changed, a few things are bound to remain the same, and relevant, too. To kick it off, here’s a post we published last June as part of our Glasto Goes Social blog series. In this post we answered a common question: how do researchers go about doing a social media monitoring or insight project? We outlined the steps that we use at Face to set up and analyze social media searches, using the project we designed in order to predict fashion trends at Glasto, the UK music festival, as an example.
Glasto Goes Social #2: Social Media Monitoring Process
credit: El Bibliomata Flickr
Last week we launched our Gasto Goes Social project, where we are testing the usefulness of social media monitoring in predciting future behavior. We thought we’d describe how we at Face go about doing a social buzz analysis project, and social media research in general. Most market researchers understand focus groups and surveys, but social media research is still new to many. The 5 steps are:
Step 1: Create Your Lexicon
This is telling your social media monitoring software what to look for. It is similar to a very complex Google search. The Glasto Goes Social Lexicon contains 324 separate searches capturing different ways of referring to the festival and different fashion brands and articles of clothing. The lexicon must be specific enough to target the particular question at hand, but also open enough to allow for the unexpected. This last is particularly important with prediction projects, like Glasto Goes Social.
We build lexicons by focusing on how the consumer talks. We start off with a simple Google search. Even the prompts from Google Instant can help us see what syntax the consumers are typing in. Google Real Time Search is also very handy when immediacy is important. Even simple Twitter Searches can be quite useful. These tools not only show us how a particular word is being used, but they also help us see similar words that we should try out next. Building a lexicon is a detail-oriented and iterative process.