Mining Social Media

In every person who wants to know how to do something, there is potential for business to profit by helping them to do it - whether this means starting a new business or adjusting the service the firm presently provides. The difficulty for most firms is discovering what people really want - they proceed on their own suppositions of what they think customers would want, generally based on their own desires or a half-baked attempt to understand the customer - but the best and most accurate information is to do a little research.

And while I've been trained in the various methods of marketing research, I've never been comfortable with their accuracy. Market research of has always been tainted on both ends - by companies asking questions to get the answers they wanted even before asking, and by customers who answer as if their decisions were always motivated by the better angels of human nature. As such, my sense is that better and more accurate information can be gleaned by observing human beings in the wild - where they are candidly themselves, and where the researcher doesn't get to decide how to phrase the questions.

Social media has some ability to enable that sort of observation - limited, of course, by the fact that people know that their behavior can be monitored by others and are (mostly) discreet in what they choose to share. So I'm not entirely sold on its accuracy - but am convinced that it is less inaccurate than other research methods.

As an example, consider the list of the most popular articles on the how-to site Wikihow. My sense is that this is semi-tainted, in that the information you can gather is limited to the level of interest in existing articles (if there is no article on a given topic, you cannot assess the level of interest in it, though a firm that wanted to test ideas could post a handful of articles to gauge interest). I'm less concerned about the effect of "posturing" by users of the site, as people are less discreet about what pages they choose to view then they are when indicating that they "like" and article, or post a comment about it.

By way of an experiment, I pulled the top 100 most popular pages - the site provides a utility for doing exactly this. Because it's a general-interest site, the information there on a random scattering of topics, but did seem to be concentrated in a few key areas:

• Relationships and Dating (30 articles)
• Software and Internet (16 articles)
• Health and Fitness (14 articles)
• Electronics and Computer Hardware (6 articles)
• Food and Cooking (5 articles)
• Writing and Communications (5 articles)

Zooming in on the "electronics and computer hardware" category, half of the questions pertained to specific products - for example: how do I add an external hard drive to a Playstation 3? This is likely of great interest to Sony, as providing documentation on doing this (or the capability to do it if it is not presently possible) will result in greater customer satisfaction for nearly two million customers who cared enough to view the article on this particular Web site. It may also be a marketing opportunity for a hard drive manufacturer to position one of its products as a "kit" for this specific need.

Another question that would be of broader interest is: "how do I save a wet cell phone?" The fact that nearly three million people (again, on this site alone) showed interest in this topic should be a clear indication of a need that cell phone manufacturers could address to improve the satisfaction of current customers and use as a copy point in marketing to make their product more appealing to new customers (especially those shopping for a replacement for a waterlogged cell phone that cannot be saved), or a demand for skins/cases that would render weaker cell phones waterproof.

Those are just two examples of opportunities that can be identified by combing social media - chances are that every single question asked holds some potential, and that most companies could find among the top thousand answers some idea or inspiration for improving their customer satisfaction and marketing to attract new customers. It's definitely a resource I plan to make greater use of in future.