hide their profiles, so you won’t be able to track them. To search the Facebook public pages, log in to Facebook and type the search query in the search bar in the header.
Tracking competitor websites
Researching Your Competitors’ Campaign Support
Practically every marketing campaign today has a social media component to it. As you see a competitor launch a major marketing campaign, scan the web and the competitor’s website for that campaign’s digital and social components. The social activity surrounding the campaign (elsewhere on the web) gives you a sense of how successful it is and how much it helps the brand. Also, watch prominent bloggers in that product category: They may be part of an outreach program and could be promoting the campaign.
Conducting qualitative research
Using the free tools and observing competitor activity is all well and good. But more often than not, you need to conduct qualitative research that doesn’t just tell you what your consumers are doing, but also the goals, needs, and aspirations that drive their behavior. Here, there’s good news and bad news.
First, the good news. Qualitative research, as you probably know it in the traditional marketing world, hasn’t changed. You can still use interviews, focus groups, shadowing, and other ethnographic research techniques to understand your consumers. There are dozens of authoritative books on the subject — including a few excellent ones from the For Dummies series, such as Marketing For Dummies, by Alexander Hiam (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.) — on qualitative research, so we won’t go into those research formats. All the same best practices of recruiting effectively, knowing your objectives, and having good interview guides and moderators apply.
And now for the bad news: The questions have changed, and you won’t get all your answers from the qualitative research. Unlike qualitative research in the past, which focused on understanding a specific consumer’s goals and needs, you must pay attention to the consumer’s surrounding community and influencers within that community. For example, you need to ask who influences your consumers when they make specific purchasing decisions.
Running surveys and quantitative research
Similarly, quantitative research in the form of statistically significant surveys can be most helpful. Keep in mind that you must run surveys at regular intervals to get valuable, statistically significant results. The reason is that influence changes more rapidly in an online environment, and the social media platforms on which people participate change, too. Don’t run extensive surveys irregularly. Run short, quick surveys about your audiences on a frequent basis to glean important insights.
Pay attention to where you run the surveys, too, because that can affect the results. A good strategy is to run the survey on your corporate website but simultaneously use a third-party survey vendor to run the same survey on the social media platforms. This way, you’re gauging how people participate and socialize in their own contexts. Very often, the quantitative research can give statistically significant results about influence, with the qualitative research being used to explain the hows and whys of the responses. The two kinds of research go hand in hand.
Some of the survey vendors that you can use include
SurveyMonkey (www.surveymonkey.com); see Figure 2-11
Zoomerang (www.zoomerang.com)
SurveyGizmo (www.surveygizmo.com)
Key Survey (www.keysurvey.com)
FIGURE 2-11: SurveyMonkey.
Seeing why all consumers are not created equal
A chapter on competition wouldn’t be complete without addressing the fact that in discussions about social influence and social media marketing, all consumers aren’t created equal. Social influence doesn’t simply mean recognizing that every consumer may influence every other consumer; rather, in specific marketing contexts, specific consumers have an outsized influence on their peers around them. For example, on a social network, one of the authors’ friends posts more comments than anyone else. Just by virtue of his volume of postings, we take his opinion into account more than that of our other friends who aren’t commenting as much.
THE PSYCHOLOGY BEHIND SOCIAL INFLUENCE
Consumers have always been heavily influenced by each other when they make purchasing decisions. They ask each other for advice; they observe and mimic each other’s decision making; and, frankly, they let peer pressure inform their decisions, whether they like to admit it or not. What’s changed is that digital behavior has caught up with offline behavior, and that’s why social media marketing matters to anyone who has a future in marketing.
Communication technologies such as social networks, prediction markets, microblogging solutions, location-based networked mobile phone applications, and even virtual worlds make it possible for consumers to influence each other more directly and dramatically than ever before. According to Harvard psychologist Herbert Kelman, this influence occurs in three ways:
Compliance: Conforming publicly while keeping one’s own private beliefs
Identification: Conforming to someone who is liked and respected, such as a celebrity or a favorite uncle
Internalization: Accepting the belief or behavior and conforming both publicly and privately
In addition to making for good copy in behavioral psychology textbooks, these concepts do translate into tactics for social media marketing.
In this regard, three steps help you gain a marketing advantage from influential consumers:
1 Discover the influential consumers.As you launch a social media marketing campaign and identify your consumers, pay extra attention to who is influencing your potential customers. Who are the consumers who
