From www.insightbuzz.com by Paul M. Banas
Insights Versus Observations:
The first theme is the concept of focusing on insights versus observations when analyzing data coming in from social listening efforts.
Said simply, an observation is a fact without wings. Something like “the brand mentions for Brand X were 45% positive during the last 12 months” or “the level of buzz around Category Y has increased 28% versus the prior year”. While both true, these observations don’t take me anywhere and they don’t lead to any implications that I can build a business idea on.
Unfortunately, many researchers are settling for summary reports from social listening efforts that are full of these type of simple findings.
Just because you observe something in the digital space versus traditional research, doesn’t make it any more interesting or valid. And just as in traditional research, meaningful insights need to be the goal of any impactful social listening effort.
Impactful insights are findings that are unexpected and can readily lead you to new ideas and new opportunities. Many times they provocatively challenge the status quo, mostly by looking at the broader context of the findings, whether by highlighting new voices (people) or new angles on old problems. They generally are built on hardcore emotions, those that are brimming with passions and tensions.
Finally, impactful insights are generally found after sifting through several levels of “Why?”. If you’re still scratching your head on why consumers are saying what they are saying in the social space, you need to dig even deeper.
The great opportunity that social listening provides is that digging deeper is infinitely possible, with millions upon millions of conversations occurring over time that we can continuously mine for insights. This means moving from simply tracking brand mentions, to understanding the underlying insights in a broader conversation.
One of the smartest people I’ve had a chance to work with in the social listening space, someone who truly understands the concept of insights versus observations, is Dan Neely of Networked Insights. In this blog post, Dan challenges researchers do go beyond mere brand mentions, and to focus on the broader context of the conversation through advanced text analytics in order to identify impactful insights.
His post also references this very relevant quote by Malcolm Bastien, who states that:
“Just like the enemy of web analytics is measurement of page views and visitors, the enemy of social media listening is listening only for brand mentions.”
