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Over the next six weeks, Nicholine Hayward, planner, brand storyteller and digital evangelist, will explain how strategic planning can benefit your business. In this the first installment, Hayward describes the tools and techniques that are essential to the process.
Friday, 12 June 2009
In 1998, as the marketing director of Weboptimiser, I came across some very interesting information. It was the raw data from the search engine GoTo’s server logs. The data showed how many people made a particular search in the last month.
To my technical colleagues, that wasn’t very exciting, but it told me, a marketer and former copywriter, what people were looking for, how many of them wanted it and how they were asking for it. We could see what the online public was asking for, in their own time, in their own words and sitting at their own PC.
Taking this data, we could use it for more insightful new product development, more relevant communications strategies and better creative executions. We could talk to consumers in their own language, to meet the needs they were telling us they had. It really was a Eureka moment and over the last ten years this initial discovery has evolved into a unique research and planning methodology.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll give you a step by step grounding in the methodology, what it is, how it works and what it can do for you.
The problem with strategic planning is that we need to know what people want. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to see what was in people’s heads without having to ask? Wouldn’t it be good to have data from a larger proportion of the population than the base sizes we normally have?
With this research methodology, we can. By looking at what millions of people are asking for and talking about online, we have access to the largest, most honest and unself-conscious focus group in the world.
There are some caveats. You don’t get a 360 degree view of one consumer. Sometimes the data can be quite hard to read, so you need to look at it from several perspectives in order to make sense of it. But it’s fresh, free and fast. The Internet is a living repository of data and will give you instant results for chemistry meetings and pitches as well as longer term planning and strategy.
Rather than relying wholly on the insights, I use them as a way of setting the agenda for further exploration and validation via the usual research channels, a catalyst for ideas or a sounding board for existing strategies.
Google Insights for Search
Google Insights for Search is a more detailed version of Google Trends and is always the best tool to start your investigation with. It shows you the level of search demand, plus news coverage, for any word or phrase you choose. The news stories that the tool lists can sometimes be a bit misleading as Google randomly selects them from its archive.
You can search by word or phrase, geography and time, so you can compare, as shown here, brand and category searches over several years.
You can also look at the top and fastest growing searches. This tells you what the most popular searches were, around the term and timescale you’ve selected. The rising searches are the fastest-growing, so you can identify surges in demand within a given timeframe.
Google Insights for Search also gives levels of regional interest, but the data is can be rather skewed by the small base sizes of some of the online populations, such as the Isle of Man.
The Google Keyword Tool
The Google Keyword tool tells you how many people (approximately) made a particular search last month, and the monthly average for the previous year. You can compare search terms broadly, to identify the key trends, or by the exact phrase. You can quantify relative demand for particular brands, see what the most popular buying criteria are and get an insight into broad market and category dynamics. I’ll explain all this in more depth later in this paper.
Google Trends for Websites
Google Trends for Websites is a useful tool for gauging the approximate level of web traffic to one or more websites and for seeing what else they searched for and where else they went, either before or afterwards.
Here, for example, is the chart for Moonpig, the greetings card site, and you can see seasonal trends, as well as useful insights into the audience and their wider online behaviour.
As with the other Google tools, you can search by country and by time period. In fact, it can be an interesting exercise to compare the data for a longer period against a shorter one, to identify the most recent trends.
There are so many tools and techniques out there to monitor online buzz and sentiment; this isn’t an exhaustive list, just my favourites. You’ll find yourself adding new ones to your portfolio as you go along, particularly those which are specific to your clients or category.
Online news services
If you want to look up or track news on a particular brand or issue, the online news services, such as Google News, are very quick and easy. You simply enter the company, brand or whatever you’re tracking, do a search and can sort the results.
If you’d rather the news came to you, than having to go looking for it, use the RSS feed for instant updates. Moreover and Yahoo also offer RSS feeds for aggregated industry news.
Google Alerts
One of your first tasks when you want to know what people are saying about a brand, issue or event, or for examples of a particular attitude or need state, is to set up Google Alerts. Simply go to Google News and click on the ‘Alerts’ button in the left hand column. You can edit and add new ones whenever you like but remember to use speech marks to designate an “exact search” if you are monitoring a phrase rather than a single word or you’ll get a lot of irrelevant results. As well as monitoring brands or companies, you can set up alerts for attitudes or need states, such as ‘my heart attack’ or ‘I love butter’.
Blog monitoring
Google Alerts are great for a regular supply of insights over time, and can bring you results very quickly and frequently. However, you also need to see the bigger picture, as reflected in the blogosphere, and identify the most influential bloggers – and hence brand advocates or detractors in relation to your brand or category. Technorati is one, Google Blog Search is another.
Another useful service is provided by Neilsen’s Blogpulse conversation tracker which tracks who is linking to blog stories. If you want to track whether a brand or issue is getting increasingly talked-about in blogs, say, before a product launch or after an advertising campaign, try Blogpulse trends.
Micro-blog monitoring
An easy way to see what people are talking about right this minute is through Twitter and its search facility. It’s great for a quick insight into the hot topics of the moment and what’s being said about a particular brand, event or issue. You can subscribe to its RSS feed, for updates, or choose email alerts.
Blog comment tracking
BackType is a blog comment tracker, and you can not only search blog comments that mention your brand, or show a particular attitude, but you can track comments left by a particular person so you can gain a greater understanding of your advocates and detractors. co.mments.com also lets you track comments and you can subscribe to the RSS feed for instant updates. With Keotag.com you can see who is using a brand or issue as a tag, over several sites.
Board monitoring tools
BoardTracker and BoardReader are both good for monitoring forum posts, topics, and actual forum names, so you can see if there are any dedicated to your brand – positive or negative.
Social bookmark tracking
Social bookmarking networks, such as Digg, del.icio.us and Reddit will let you search for submitted stories and offer RSS, so you can see which stories have gained traction.
Social Mention
Another useful tool for taking a snapshot of conversations around your brand is Social Mention. You can choose from blogs, twitter, bookmarks, comments, events and images.
Facebook Lexicon
With Facebook Lexicon, you can see how often a keyword is discussed on Facebook users’ walls. You can also see demographic and sentiment data for the most popular terms.
Photo and video sharing sites
Flickr offers an RSS subscription that will update you on any new image that matches your word or phrase. Likewise Google Video can help you track videos from many online hosting sites (such as YouTube and MetaCafe).
Wikis
If you’d like to keep track of how a Wikipedia page is changing, you can track change history for any Wikipedia page.
Q & A forums
Question and answer sites such as Yahoo Answers and the Answerbank are a good way to find out consumers views on particular topics, issues, or brands, or to see what people are asking about right now, to get a feel for the mood of the moment.
The review sites, such as Doyoo, Kelkoo and Ciao are a great source of insight into what people are looking for, what they need and what they think of your brand. You can use the insight to identify problems with your product or service, highlight potential NPD opportunities and see what kind of language consumers use to talk about you.
It’s true that thanks to word of mouth marketing, some of these people are being paid to review products, but don’t let that put you off. They take their responsibilities to the online public seriously, enjoy the opportunity to speak out and tend to be honest in their feedback.
This technique is a gem and almost comically simple. Just make an exact search (i.e. in speech marks) of an attitude or statement, couched in the words in which you’d like to find the information. You can leave it open in order to get a wider range of results. You can use it to identify motivations, behaviours, need states and use case scenarios.
So now we’ve got our arsenal of tools and techniques, we can start to look at how to use them. In module two, I’ll take the first stages in a typical strategic development processes, namely ‘where are we now and how did we get here?’ and explore at how online research can provide some fascinating insights to help us understand our current situation and what might have caused it.
Follow the IAB on Twitter
Friday, 12 June 2009
In 1998, as the marketing director of Weboptimiser, I came across some very interesting information. It was the raw data from the search engine GoTo’s server logs. The data showed how many people made a particular search in the last month.
To my technical colleagues, that wasn’t very exciting, but it told me, a marketer and former copywriter, what people were looking for, how many of them wanted it and how they were asking for it. We could see what the online public was asking for, in their own time, in their own words and sitting at their own PC.
Taking this data, we could use it for more insightful new product development, more relevant communications strategies and better creative executions. We could talk to consumers in their own language, to meet the needs they were telling us they had. It really was a Eureka moment and over the last ten years this initial discovery has evolved into a unique research and planning methodology.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll give you a step by step grounding in the methodology, what it is, how it works and what it can do for you.
Strategic planning for the real world – Module one
The problem with strategic planning is that we need to know what people want. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to see what was in people’s heads without having to ask? Wouldn’t it be good to have data from a larger proportion of the population than the base sizes we normally have?
With this research methodology, we can. By looking at what millions of people are asking for and talking about online, we have access to the largest, most honest and unself-conscious focus group in the world.
There are some caveats. You don’t get a 360 degree view of one consumer. Sometimes the data can be quite hard to read, so you need to look at it from several perspectives in order to make sense of it. But it’s fresh, free and fast. The Internet is a living repository of data and will give you instant results for chemistry meetings and pitches as well as longer term planning and strategy.
Rather than relying wholly on the insights, I use them as a way of setting the agenda for further exploration and validation via the usual research channels, a catalyst for ideas or a sounding board for existing strategies.
Tools and Techniques
To find out what people are looking for
Google Insights for Search
Google Insights for Search is a more detailed version of Google Trends and is always the best tool to start your investigation with. It shows you the level of search demand, plus news coverage, for any word or phrase you choose. The news stories that the tool lists can sometimes be a bit misleading as Google randomly selects them from its archive.
You can search by word or phrase, geography and time, so you can compare, as shown here, brand and category searches over several years.
You can also look at the top and fastest growing searches. This tells you what the most popular searches were, around the term and timescale you’ve selected. The rising searches are the fastest-growing, so you can identify surges in demand within a given timeframe.
Google Insights for Search also gives levels of regional interest, but the data is can be rather skewed by the small base sizes of some of the online populations, such as the Isle of Man.
The Google Keyword Tool
The Google Keyword tool tells you how many people (approximately) made a particular search last month, and the monthly average for the previous year. You can compare search terms broadly, to identify the key trends, or by the exact phrase. You can quantify relative demand for particular brands, see what the most popular buying criteria are and get an insight into broad market and category dynamics. I’ll explain all this in more depth later in this paper.
Google Trends for Websites
Google Trends for Websites is a useful tool for gauging the approximate level of web traffic to one or more websites and for seeing what else they searched for and where else they went, either before or afterwards.
Here, for example, is the chart for Moonpig, the greetings card site, and you can see seasonal trends, as well as useful insights into the audience and their wider online behaviour.
As with the other Google tools, you can search by country and by time period. In fact, it can be an interesting exercise to compare the data for a longer period against a shorter one, to identify the most recent trends.
To find out what people are talking about
There are so many tools and techniques out there to monitor online buzz and sentiment; this isn’t an exhaustive list, just my favourites. You’ll find yourself adding new ones to your portfolio as you go along, particularly those which are specific to your clients or category.
Online news services
If you want to look up or track news on a particular brand or issue, the online news services, such as Google News, are very quick and easy. You simply enter the company, brand or whatever you’re tracking, do a search and can sort the results.
If you’d rather the news came to you, than having to go looking for it, use the RSS feed for instant updates. Moreover and Yahoo also offer RSS feeds for aggregated industry news.
Google Alerts
One of your first tasks when you want to know what people are saying about a brand, issue or event, or for examples of a particular attitude or need state, is to set up Google Alerts. Simply go to Google News and click on the ‘Alerts’ button in the left hand column. You can edit and add new ones whenever you like but remember to use speech marks to designate an “exact search” if you are monitoring a phrase rather than a single word or you’ll get a lot of irrelevant results. As well as monitoring brands or companies, you can set up alerts for attitudes or need states, such as ‘my heart attack’ or ‘I love butter’.
Blog monitoring
Google Alerts are great for a regular supply of insights over time, and can bring you results very quickly and frequently. However, you also need to see the bigger picture, as reflected in the blogosphere, and identify the most influential bloggers – and hence brand advocates or detractors in relation to your brand or category. Technorati is one, Google Blog Search is another.
Another useful service is provided by Neilsen’s Blogpulse conversation tracker which tracks who is linking to blog stories. If you want to track whether a brand or issue is getting increasingly talked-about in blogs, say, before a product launch or after an advertising campaign, try Blogpulse trends.
Micro-blog monitoring
An easy way to see what people are talking about right this minute is through Twitter and its search facility. It’s great for a quick insight into the hot topics of the moment and what’s being said about a particular brand, event or issue. You can subscribe to its RSS feed, for updates, or choose email alerts.
Blog comment tracking
BackType is a blog comment tracker, and you can not only search blog comments that mention your brand, or show a particular attitude, but you can track comments left by a particular person so you can gain a greater understanding of your advocates and detractors. co.mments.com also lets you track comments and you can subscribe to the RSS feed for instant updates. With Keotag.com you can see who is using a brand or issue as a tag, over several sites.
Board monitoring tools
BoardTracker and BoardReader are both good for monitoring forum posts, topics, and actual forum names, so you can see if there are any dedicated to your brand – positive or negative.
Social bookmark tracking
Social bookmarking networks, such as Digg, del.icio.us and Reddit will let you search for submitted stories and offer RSS, so you can see which stories have gained traction.
Social Mention
Another useful tool for taking a snapshot of conversations around your brand is Social Mention. You can choose from blogs, twitter, bookmarks, comments, events and images.
To monitor social network buzz
Facebook Lexicon
With Facebook Lexicon, you can see how often a keyword is discussed on Facebook users’ walls. You can also see demographic and sentiment data for the most popular terms.
Photo and video sharing sites
Flickr offers an RSS subscription that will update you on any new image that matches your word or phrase. Likewise Google Video can help you track videos from many online hosting sites (such as YouTube and MetaCafe).
Wikis
If you’d like to keep track of how a Wikipedia page is changing, you can track change history for any Wikipedia page.
Q & A forums
Question and answer sites such as Yahoo Answers and the Answerbank are a good way to find out consumers views on particular topics, issues, or brands, or to see what people are asking about right now, to get a feel for the mood of the moment.
To read what people are saying about brands and companies
The review sites, such as Doyoo, Kelkoo and Ciao are a great source of insight into what people are looking for, what they need and what they think of your brand. You can use the insight to identify problems with your product or service, highlight potential NPD opportunities and see what kind of language consumers use to talk about you.
It’s true that thanks to word of mouth marketing, some of these people are being paid to review products, but don’t let that put you off. They take their responsibilities to the online public seriously, enjoy the opportunity to speak out and tend to be honest in their feedback.
To find people who feel a certain way
This technique is a gem and almost comically simple. Just make an exact search (i.e. in speech marks) of an attitude or statement, couched in the words in which you’d like to find the information. You can leave it open in order to get a wider range of results. You can use it to identify motivations, behaviours, need states and use case scenarios.
So now we’ve got our arsenal of tools and techniques, we can start to look at how to use them. In module two, I’ll take the first stages in a typical strategic development processes, namely ‘where are we now and how did we get here?’ and explore at how online research can provide some fascinating insights to help us understand our current situation and what might have caused it.
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