Pulsar, Face Social Media Immersion Platform and Methodology
When working on consumer immersion using ethnography, a relatively small panel is the only way forward. Clearly if you are a good researcher the results are very insightful. However, we’re nevertheless talking about involving 10, 20, 30 consumers, whose opinion will shape the outcome of the project and ultimately your strategic decisions.
Now, as far as ethnography and netnography are concerned and as far as the sample is representative, you still have to admit that you are basing your decisions on the opinions of an incredibly small group of consumers.
Now, what if you could do qualitative consumer immersion involving thousands of consumers?
Well that’s exactly what social media finally allows us to do: for the first time millions of opinions and conversations are available online in an endless, and mostly open, insights field. The problem is, how do you listen to so many opinions without losing the quality of the ethnographic approach over the quantitative reach of your antennas?
You need a good social media monitoring technology and a sophisticate methodology that will allow you to track, mine and understand massive buzz clouds. And that’s what we’re doing here at Face using Pulsar, our social media immersion technology and methodology that allows us to turn thousands of conversations into rich insights: quantity into quality.
Using APIs, tracking technologies, semantic analysis and social network analysis tools, Pulsar allows us to measure:
The Brand social media presence: How many conversations about you are going on over a certain period of time? When is the number of messages peaking? And why?
The Brand Quantitative and Qualitative visibility: Knowing the plain numbers of your social media presence isn’t going to help you unless you know how influential these conversations are. This is why Pulsar weighs the messages using our quantitative visibility algorithm and then assess the sentiment of these contents to tell you what part of your visibility is negative, positive and neutral.
The Topics, Issues and Perceptions: What are these conversations about? What are the emerging issues? How is your brand and your product/service perceived? What are the values that are most associated with your brand?
The Brand Social Network: Where are these conversations being held? What are the most influential sources? What are the channels that you should target?
The Brand Influencers: Finally, who are your influencers across blogs, forums, news sites and social networks? We then feed this insight into the planning process to get the most out of the crowdsourcing and co-creation processes.
We have been working on a number of new projects using Pulsar and some case studies will follow soon. In the meanwhile, if you feel like immersing in social media do get in touch!
