Good entrepreneurs find information and inspiration all around them, not just in formal, 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.
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. We’ve found that it’s the sort of work that can’t be done by computer analysis alone.
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:
- In-the-moment – people comment in the midst of their pain points or delights, instead of after-the-fact recall
- Depth of data – people tend to go deep, and give all sorts of accompanying visuals, videos or other artifacts
- Connect the periphery – people only share what they deem relevant when we ask the question, but when we look at what’s out there without asking the question we’re able to uncover periphery insights that are more relevant than might have first been thought
- Cost-effective – no recruiting, facility or travel fees
- Quick – start to finish in 5 to 10 business days
- National representation – artifacts are gathered across US markets
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:
- Benefits that delight, or that are sought after
- Unmet needs
- Behavior
- Feelings/emotions
- Language or paradigms used to discuss
These learnings typically fuel product or commercial innovation and often feed our ideation workshops. In the past 6 months, we’ve used social media research to inform concept development, product naming, category aisle layout 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.
The Garage Group helps brands and organizations innovate and grow like startups.