Buzz monitoring

Buzz monitoring is the monitoring of consumer responses to commercial services and products in order to establish the marketing buzz surrounding a new or existing offer. Similar to media monitoring it is becoming increasingly popular as a base for strategic insight development alongside other forms of market research.[1]

Buzz monitoring involves the checking and analysis of myriad online sources such as internet forums, blogs, and social networks. Data can be provided in real time, which means that critical issues can be picked up instantly. It is also comparatively inexpensive compared to other market research tools and can actually guide further product and service developments. Influence is a key question in buzz monitoring – does this particular person and/or this particular piece of content matter and is it influencing others? Hence, the influence of a source is an important buzz monitoring metric that should be benchmarked.

Buzz monitoring is implemented by businesses for a variety of reasons, namely to improve efficiency, reaction times and identify future opportunities. Insights gained can help guide marketing and communications, identify positive and negative customer experiences, assess product and service demand, tackle crisis management, round off competitor analysis, establish brand equity and predict market share.

Tools

In the era of the technological prosperity social networks became an essential tool for Buzz Monitoring, due to the large scale of opinions and information shared between great amounts of users.[2] Recently, the subject for a TREC Conference became an ingrowing interest of monitoring and scrutinizing opinions shared on-line.[3] One of the main advantages of using social networks for Buzz Monitoring is price availability, as this method could be considered rather cheap, comparing to other sources of information.[4] Many types of social networks have added specific features which help to observe an on-line activity of their friends or followers. One of the first examples of those features is a “Hot Topics” section on the Blogspot, which have been added on the website in 2009.[2] Other social networks including Google with “Google Alerts”, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo also added similar services. Twitter using micro-blogging platform could be reasonably considered as one of the most powerful free tool for Buzz Monitoring.[2] With its micro-blogging facilities users are capable of sharing their thoughts quickly and promptly, view the latest trending topics and also search the profiles of people without the need to “follow” them. Other widely used tools such as Mention, Alterian-SM2, BrandWatch and Converseon are designed specifically for monitoring information.[5] These online tools are not available for free; however, they provide more features and are more complicated and sophisticated than online platforms such as Google Alerts. When deciding which tool would better suit your specific product you need to carefully consider some features such as which market segment you want to consider and what type of data you are expecting to collect. For example, if you are willing to define the strategy for the future, you would probably be looking for the tool that allows you to track information during the past several months or years. The collected information can then be restrained using the data analysis tools, built on Structured Query Language (SQL) for the later use.[6]

Types of buzz

The direct correlation between the consumer response and the success of the brand or product has recently been determined.[7] The buzz around the certain product can be divided into several groups: the positive buzz that is sometimes also called “the white buzz”, the negative named as “the black buzz” and the neutral buzz.[8] The white and the black buzz correspondingly can be calculated using binaryEnotion and following formulas:

White Buzz = (Positive > (Neutral + Negative))
Black Buzz = (Negative > (Neutral + Positive))[9]

The abovementioned notations can be best described by the assumption that the White Buzz is formed when the total amount of positive comments is greater than the sum of neutral and negative ones. The same can also be applied in the case of the black buzz. For obtaining the more accurate data it might be suggested to search as much information as possible, as the correctness of data is directly proportional to the amount of the consumers’ responses examined.[10] Recent studies have indicated that the impact of negative comments tends to be higher than that of positive ones as they think they are more credible. However it might depend on customer’s reaction on different type of comments.[11] People are also inclined to share their negative experience more than the positive one in order to raise public awareness and prevent their friends and relatives from using the same service.[12] Thus, it might be recommended for a big companies to reduce the black buzz around the product or brand rather than increasing the amount of positive comments.[6]

Effects

Buzz, also sometimes referred to as a "word-of-mouth phenomenon", has always been around and can have a great effect on a product's reputation.[13] While advertisement gets more obsolete and hard to understand, communication between the user and producer is becoming more and more common.[6] Managers of the company should always be aware of the buzz that is going around their product, work in cooperation with the audience and be constantly prepared to stop any enormous negative attack from the core. Having collected all necessary information from the customers, managers should compare the functioning in the market of their own product to the competitor’s one and to determine the further strategy, defining strong and weak sides of the product.[14]

As suggested, there are exactly two pathways of the response to an online buzz from the different point of views. Managers of the companies affected by an existing buzz would try to reduce or increase the costs of the product depending on what kind of reviews they have received; they also might try to improve the service or goods in case of prevailing amount of negative opinions. Customers would likewise make their decisions about the product, deciding to either buy it in future or avoid the further usage. Both pathways directly affect the company’s profitability and the brand image.[11] When used in the right way, buzz monitoring could also increase the public awareness of the product.

However, there also might be some disadvantages linked to buzz monitoring. As the online buzz is getting more important and easy to access, marketing agents are trying to increase the ratio of positive reviews and to create the great amount of buzz around the certain product or service they need to sell in order to increase the profit and public awareness.

References

  1. ↑ "What Is Buzz Monitoring?". wiseGEEK.
  2. 1 2 3 Cuvelier, Etienne; Aufaure, Marie-Aude (2011). A buzz and e-reputation monitoring tool for twitter based on galois lattices. Berlin, Germany: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. pp. 91–103. Retrieved 27 October 2014.
  3. ↑ Ounis; de Rijke; Mishne; Soboroff (2006). "Overview of the trec 2006 blog track". The Fifteenth Text Retrieval Conference Proceedings 272: 17–31. Retrieved 27 October 2014.
  4. ↑ "Blogging4Business report". Strategic Direction 22 (9): 18–20. 2006. doi:10.1108/02580540610686504. Retrieved 27 October 2014.
  5. ↑ Savrakantonakis (2012). "An approach for evaluation of social media monitoring tools" (PDF). Common Value Management 52. Retrieved 27 October 2014.
  6. 1 2 3 Kirby, Justin; Marsden, Paul (2006). Connected Marketing: The Viral, Buzz and Word of Mouth Revolution. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
  7. ↑ Reichheld, F.F. (2003). "The one number you need to grow" (PDF). Harvard Business Review 81 (12): 26–54. Retrieved 27 October 2014.
  8. ↑ Strapparava; Guerini; Ozbal (2011). Persuasive language and virality in social networks. Berlin, Germany: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. pp. 357–366.
  9. ↑ Guerini; Strapparava; Ozbal. "Exploring Text Virality in Social Neworks". Retrieved 27 October 2014.
  10. ↑ Fensel, Dieter; Kett, Holger; Grobelnik, Marko. "Common Value Management 1st International Workshop on Common Value Management". ESWC2012. Retrieved 27 October 2014.
  11. 1 2 Shin; Hanssens; Gajula (2008). The impact of positive vs. negative online buzz on retail prices. CL, USA: UCLA working paper.
  12. ↑ Diener; Greyser (1978). "Cosumer views of redress needs". J. Marketing 42: 21–27. doi:10.2307/1250081.
  13. ↑ Walter, J. Carl (May 2006). "What's all the buzz about?: Everyday communication and relational bases of Word-of-Mouth and Buzz marketing practices". Management Communication Quarterly 19: 601–634.
  14. ↑ Mattern, F.; Huhn, W.; Perrey, J.; Dorner, K.; Lorenz, J.; Spillecke, D. (2012). Turning buzz into gold. How pioneers create value from media. London, UK: McKinsey&Company.

External links

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