Social Media, Analytics and Guacamole

Who knew there was a connection between social media and guacamole? More on that in a second …

Last week at the NetBase Seattle meet-up, discussion centered on the ways good social media monitoring and data analysis lead to true customer insight. The panel event included representatives from WE, T-Mobile and 113 Industries and explored how companies in the area are leveraging NetBase.

Because I’m a data geek, I was excited to speak about how WE is building credibility inside our own agency using NetBase in new business pitches. Beth Russell, manager of T-Mobile social media reporting and analytics, also spoke to how her team monitors mentions during launches to inform how the company will change plan features based on real-time feedback.

Then, featured speaker Razi Imam from 113 Industries, blew all of our minds as he shared stories about how he is leveraging social to understand human behavior.  He challenged us to rethink social and its potential impact.

Companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to make decisions for millions of customers based on the words of less than 10 in a focus group. But social media is the world’s largest organic focus group. We don’t have to guess what people are saying or thinking about brands when hundreds of millions of conversations about anything are right at our fingertips! Thanks to NetBase, if our partners or clients want to know what influencers or audiences are thinking, doing, saying or feeling at any given moment — we can find out!

The case study Razi discussed involved a popular food brand that successfully re-positioned its struggling guacamole product as a sandwich spread instead of a dip. It  turned to NetBase — the global focus group — to understand people and their guacamole eating behaviors. Turns out, guacamole is very personal. We have our own  recipes that we favor (mine is spicy!), and most of us are not about to buy a pre-made guacamole dip when we are hosting. Razi saw an opportunity that the company  could leverage. People were talking about guacamole in scenarios outside the chip dip. Razi saw a lot of people posting about how they love an avocado spread on  sandwiches, toast and burgers. In fact, people love spreads — they want more spread options. So the company decided to shift its product — and it was a success!

What really got me was that the insight that led to the turnaround came from social media monitoring — not focus groups. And when you consider that people post,  tweet and snap all day long, it’s not surprising that good analysis will uncover behavioral trends across cohorts numbering in the thousands.

The world’s largest focus group is waiting for us on the internet, hiding in tweets, Instagram hashtags, consumer reviews or blog posts.

From my vantage as an analytics professional, I would much rather advise a client to take action based on a trend we see spread across thousands of people rather  than a few focus groups with an n=15. It was a great discussion, and it reminded me that being in an agency with an amazing Insights and Analytics team is a great  gig and the power of insight is unlimited.