In early 2011, Pepsi made headlines by announcing that after more than 20 years, they would forego advertising during the Super Bowl. Instead, PepsiCo decided to award more than $20 million in grants to fund community projects. Anyone could submit a grant application online, and award winners would be chosen by popular vote. News of Pepsi’s contest spread across social media, and with each mention, the Pepsi name was further associated with a philanthropic brand image. Contestants extended the brand promotion as they campaigned for their own personal causes, driving more traffic to Pepsi’s website.

In a similar move, P&G, one of the world’s largest marketing organizations, announced in February 2012 that they would reduce their marketing budget by $10 billion over the next four years. Much of the savings would be achieved by shifting their efforts away from traditional offline marketing methods in favor of digital marketing tools such as online banner ads, viral marketing, and social media marketing.

As individuals, we make decisions about whether to post our opinions to social media and what opinions to post. When we make these decisions, we are subject to a host of social influences. While we may have intended to express our thoughts on the latest restaurant that we visited or a movie that we recently saw, posting comments online doesn’t occur in a vacuum. Based on what others have said previously, what we choose to say (that is, if we choose to say anything at all) may change once we sit down at the computer.

Earlier chapters discussed how our opinion formation and expression behaviors change as we are exposed to the opinions that others have already posted. In turn, the opinions we express today will affect how others behave in the future. Social media platforms can be seen as opinion ecosystems where our viewpoints interact and influence those of other contributors. Some opinions will be discouraged and driven out of the ecosystem through selection effects. Other opinions adapt to the environment as a result of a variety of adjustment effects. As a result, the collective opinion of the posting population evolves.

A search of employment opportunities in social media inevitably turns up something like the following:

In other words, the employer wants a communications associate whose main job is to tweet and blog.

Like many organizations, the employer represented here views social media as just another platform for advertising and communications. The person in charge of the social media efforts may be informed about the organization’s overall strategy, but his or her role is to simply use social media to communicate this strategy to the target consumer or constituency. This perspective on how social media fits into the organization can be very limiting and potentially problematic. Let’s break down the pitfalls associated with this line of reasoning.

It used to be that when a new movie was released, moviegoers would look to the opinions of professional movie critics before deciding whether to see it. Under this paradigm, professional critics wielded an enormous amount of power and influence to either make or break a new movie. In today’s environment, however, social media host reviews from anyone who wants to share an opinion. And now, before we head out to the theaters, we look online for not only the reviews provided by professional movie critics but also the reviews posted by friends, and sometimes even strangers, who have already seen the movie.

Arguably, social media have the potential to give a voice to everyone, making us less reliant on the opinions of a few experts. As consumers, that means that we have available to us a wider variety of opinions. Thus, we can follow the opinions of trusted sources who share our views rather than individuals whom others have deemed to be experts. This means that through social media, an organization or business has access to the wide variety of opinions held by its various customers and stakeholders. Their opinions, rather than those of a few top executives, can now drive many of the organization’s strategic decisions. Is this a good thing? Should a company trust HiPPO (the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) or should it follow the opinions of masses on social media?

It has become a staple in American politics that in just about every speech or debate, presidential candidates manage to work in a story about the struggles of Mr. and Mrs. John Smith from a swing state. Candidates talk to thousands of voters on the campaign trail. But these are the stories that they remember and choose to retell because, to them, they represent the stories of the larger population.

It is easy to understand why politicians latch on to these anecdotes. On a daily basis, teams of advisors and crowds of voters share their stories and offer their opinions on everything from taxes to foreign policies to healthcare reform. Even what they wear comes under scrutiny and often garners volumes of unsolicited feedback. How do politicians and other decision makers parse through all of these suggestions to identify the handful of opinions that are truly important and relevant to the larger population? Put bluntly, how do we know that the average American cares about Mr. and Mrs. John Smith’s stories?

Occasionally, we find ourselves in situations where we express an opinion that doesn’t perfectly represent the opinion that we actually hold. You don’t really like the sweater your aunt gave you last Christmas, but you tell her how much you love it and wear it anyway. Your boss’s jokes just aren’t that funny, but you at least let out a little chuckle. These are just some of the situations we find ourselves in when social norms contribute to our putting forth a viewpoint that isn’t entirely consistent with what we actually think.

In some cases, we’re just being polite when we pay someone a compliment, or we are simply choosing the path of least resistance. Even when we do hold strong opinions about a particular topic, we may temper what we say based on how we think someone else might react. We adjust our opinions to better conform to the social contexts in which we find ourselves.

In the previous chapter we discussed how environmental cues can affect whether or not we express any opinion at all. In this chapter, we discuss how our environment affects what opinion we express; in particular, we focus on the effects that others in our environment have on our opinion expression behavior.

In his book Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore argues that for a product to succeed in the mass market, it must cross the chasm that separates the innovative consumers from the rest of the market, the previously discussed imitators. But simply getting the approval of the innovators is not enough to penetrate the mass market. Instead, a few influential individuals among the innovator population can play a critical role in bridging the gap between the innovator population and the mass market.

Is this the only path toward success for a new product? In a study of how information is transmitted across a social network, Watts and Dodd demonstrate that it is not always the influential power of a few that leads to the diffusion of information. An alternative path for diffusion of information exists if there is “a critical mass of easily influenced individuals” who can fuel the viral takeoff of an product, idea, or opinion.

Preface

In the world of Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp, water-cooler conversations with co-workers and backyard small talk with neighbors have moved from the physical world to the digital arena. Previous exchanges with familiar and trusted individuals have been replaced by large-scale chatter accessible to acquaintances and strangers. Discussions that once went unrecorded now leave traces that can be explored years later. The way in which we share information and opinions has changed irrevocably.

In this new landscape, organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies to government agencies to political campaigns continuously monitor online opinions in an effort to guide their actions. Are consumers satisfied with our product? How are our policies being perceived? Do voters agree with our platform? Brand managers, marketers, and campaign managers can potentially find answers to these questions by monitoring the opinions shared through social media.

But measuring online opinion is more complex than just reading a few posted reviews. In this book, we move beyond the current practice of social media monitoring and introduce the concept of social media intelligence. While social media monitoring is an essential step in developing a social media intelligence platform, it is by nature descriptive and retrospective. That is, social media monitoring describes what has already happened. It does not prescribe or guide an organization’s next steps.

Social Media Intelligence Today

The current state of social media intelligence is one where organizations are investing in social media monitoring but drowning in social media data and metrics. In an effort to make sense of the seemingly infinite volume of data that social media produces on a daily basis, analysts are computing an equally overwhelming number of metrics. The problem is that organizations are measuring what is easy to measure with the data. Twitter data are easy to collect and volume metrics are easy to compute, so metrics like the number of Twitter mentions or the number of Twitter followers are over-emphasized. Rather than going after the low hanging fruit, we need to shift our focus from measuring what’s easy to measure to measuring what matters. In other words, what are the metrics that will influence our strategic decision making? And our ability to define these metrics will depend on a firm understanding of opinion science.

Organizations have also struggled with integrating the intelligence gathered from social media data with other sources of data that marketing researchers have relied on for decades. Many organizations are faced with multiple research reports produced from traditional focus groups, customers surveys, in-store sales data, and social media. In several cases, the social media reports don’t align with other studies, especially when the social media metrics are not adjusted to accommodate the various biases we know exist from the opinion science research. When faced with these conflicting reports, organizations tend to favor the tried and tested offline methods over the very new and untested social media metrics. But organizations shouldn’t give up on social media intelligence quite that quickly, especially while social media tools are in their infancy. An integrated research approach that includes both the traditional offline methods and social media intelligence can be very effective, timely, and cost-efficient. The key is to track the right social media metrics and integrate social media intelligence efforts with other marketing research programs. Integration would involve the alignment of social media metrics with the offline metrics in such a way that the multiple sources of marketing intelligence complement one another. Social media intelligence can be used as an early indicator of general problem areas and offline methods can used to investigate further as a follow-up study.