Related posts:

1. Measuring Social Media Success: 3 NY Wine Stores and Social Mention
2. Local Wine Stores on Local Search: the Top 10 Things You Can Do
3. Monitoring Three New York Wine Stores: the quiet one, the promising one, and the over achiever

These social media research (netnography) software people have been busy recently and posted some interesting netnography research. I’m going to go through them here and look for insights for wine retailers.

French Champagne and Social Media

The first NetBase post is called Brand Passion Index: Piper’s Bubbles Burst with Love

Champagne Brand Passion Index

The amount of chatter about a brand is indicated by the size of the bubble, while the placement of the bubble shows the intensity of passion. Source: NetBase

Given these are well known French champagne brands I guess its no surprise that they are liked (top half of the graph). But only a few are passionately loved. In particular, Piper-Heidsieck. Here’s how NetBase puts it,

“Piper-Heidsieck who generated the most amount of love chatter. Metrics in NetBase showed that consumers love the extravagance, the romance of it being a favorite of Marie-Antoinette, combined with its affordability. Piper is a champagne with a long history of 225 years.”

Remember that’s from a consumer point of view and reminds me of the adage that a brand only exists in a consumers mind. Everything else is just graphic design.

It’s interesting that Dom Perignon is regarded as boring! Time for a new brand manager in the US I reckon, how could you let Dom Perignon become seen as boring!?

Cristal’s boss apparently made a tactless remark which accounts for the poor net sentiment. Jay-Z (hip hop artist whose rap includes, “Let’s sip the Cris and get pissy-pissy“) apparently heard that his attention was unwelcome, called it racist, and when a celeb says a brand is racist then it’s doomed. The fact that it hasn’t bottomed out in the Hate section of the Brand Passion Index is probably due to the wording of the comments.

The Wine Story

The key to me is the importance of the wine story. I can see someone trading up from a cheap sparkling wine to Piper-Heidsieck based on a yarn about Marie-Antoinette. They could take that story to a dinner table.

Jay-Z's friends

It would be a brave person to take a bottle of Cristal when Jay-Z was suggesting it was a racist’s brand.

Supermarkets

The other netnography I wanted to look at was a series about Supermarkets. I’ve already gone through a NetBase demo about Wine Stores as described in this post.

No surprise that the key factors were:

• Selection
• Price
• Service.

This is also the case with Supermarkets

Except Store Brands were a much bigger issue than service.

The NetBase post that summarizes the Supermarket series is probably the best one to start with.

Store brands are such a big issue because they’ve been pushing out national brands (sound familiar?). Some people are loving the store brands (Trader Joe’s), others are very frustrated that they can’t find their favorites any longer.

Sidenote: Often there is social media chatter that directly contradicts itself reminding market researchers that they really are just aggregating individuals opinions, not describing absolute facts.

Here’s what NetNase says about a Recipe for The Ideal Supermarket,

“So what does the ideal supermarket look like? In a nutshell, it offers high-quality store brands that are priced below nationally advertised brands but the same or lower than store brands at other supermarkets. It stocks its store brands in addition to—not in place of—the national brands. And it offers a wide selection of products, being careful not to run out of common products, which annoys shoppers and forces them to go elsewhere for basic purchases.”

Coupons are a huge deal as is comparatively low pricing – no surprise there.

One last area that Publix and Safeway did well in was take-out food. Though Safeway had a regular stock-out issue.

There was not much chatter about supermarkets and wine, though there was a bit about beer. Which I think is good news for small wine stores, though perhaps not so good for the wine category as a whole.

Insight

If you are going to offer your own brand (which I think is a good idea in a market of bulk wine oversupply) then make sure that it’s value for money. Especially if you let it be known as your own brand. Unless you’re a discounter, in which case what are you reading this blog for?

What’s your thoughts?

Photos courtesy of: jay z watch, and Jay-Z Convert

Related posts:

1. America’s Most Popular Wine Store? Social Research suggests it may be BevMo
2. Does the market love you or hate you? One way to find out Sentiment

NetBase kindly gave me the data and a demo on some of America’s most popular wine stores (plus a distributor):

• BevMo
• Total Wine and More
• K&L Wine Merchants
• The Wine Club
• National Wine & Spirits

It is compiled using NetBase‘s ConsumerBase product that  I wrote about it in a previous post. One of the things this tool does is finds, understands, and automatically analyzes social media conversations about a brand or topic, and then generates graphs and reports on the emotions, behaviors and levels of passion surrounding that brand.

The Brand Passion Index Graph is one example of the output. Here’s what it said about wine stores:

Wine Store Brand Passion Index

• On the vertical axis is “Sentiment and Chatter Voulme“, negative at the bottom going up to positive at the top.
• The horizontal axis is “Passion Intensity“, weak to the left, strong to the right.
• The amount of sentiment and chatter is indicated by the size of the bubble.

So you want to be large and in the top right.

The key insight is how well BevMo is regarded

Total Wine and More does best with position but is drowned out by BevMo which also does well though without the same % of positive sentiment.

The Wine Club also does very well but is squeezed out by Total Wine.

K & L Wine Merchants, who I’ve written about before, is well liked but does not evoke passion among its customers.

I actually asked the folks at NetBase to research some New York wine stores (see my SocialMention review for the stores). They were very helpful but suggested some other stores instead as they had more data on these. So, please note, the actual choice of stores (and the distributor) was by NetBase not myself.

Let’s dig into the report

Likes and Dislikes

For these wine stores the most popular phrases were “great selection” and “not have it” for Like and Dislike respectively. So range seems to be the biggest issue in social media chatter.

Of course price was mentioned in various ways, mainly positively. Service was mentioned negatively. Otherwise the phrases are general likes and dislikes.

From this I’d say that consumers are after range, at the right prices, with good service. Frankly that’s not terribly insightful to industry insiders – outside of the emphasis on range.

Range it is

The Analyse Insights and Themes Report provide a pie chart of these likes and confirms that range is important.

I’d need to dig into the data over a period of days or weeks to assess exactly what range, but the demo suggests there were sufficient posts to work this out.

What is very interesting are the domains

Here are the Top 10:

• twitter.com
• yelp.com
• cellartracker.com
• chow.com
• facebook.com
• chowbound.chow.com
• bigsoccer.com
• almanacnews.com
• santabarbaraview.com/
• wineberserkers.com

This for me is probably the biggest insight of all.

Yelp and cellartracker are very powerful but chow and wineberserkers are much bigger than I expected! Twitter is as important as ever, and Facebook is only at #5 (perhaps because NetBase cannot access private personal pages, only business fan pages).

Bigsoccer is about soccer, but it does have other forum topics including wine. And almanacnews.com and santabarbaraview.com are reporting on the plans of Bevmo to open stores in their area (mainly negative articles).

How to utilize this data – range, range and range

Range jumps out as the most important issue using wine social network research. If you’re thinking of how to develop your store look at range first, not price or service.

The Bigger Picture

Remember this table?

It’s from Owyang and Lovett’s report that came up with a series of social media metrics. They outline social media types, the ways to measure it, and which social media analytics and/or monitoring software can do what.

NetBase does very very well in relation to these metrics for Sentiment Ratio and Share of Voice through the Brand Passion Index and the various other sentiment reports shown above e.g. Likes/Dislikes.

There is a wealth of insights as you dig into these reports (and thanks to the NetBase team for demoing this for me).

What this doesn’t tell us

Demographics

The raw data is made up of social media comments from the internet. It doesn’t show us geography, age, or gender and I don’t see how it could as the raw data doesn’t include this information.

Small Brands and Stores

If the social media world is talking about you then this tool should pick up the conversations and help you analyze them. If you’re a small store with little social media then it ain’t for you other than to understand what is being said about the wine retail category and your social media savvy competitors.

Advocates and Influencers

Specifically

• the ability to track down who are important advocates for brands
• to track down important influencers of consumers
• see if, and how, the tool weights each mention e.g. a store’s promo tweet vs a wine critics’s blog post

It would be great if they could come up with a formula that weights some results higher than others like Google does with links and authoritative sources.

They are great for social research and analysis. Look elsewhere for basic listening and monitoring tools.

Social Media Monitoring Tools Conclusion

I’ve been writing about social media monitoring across a number of posts:

• Monitoring Three New York Wine Stores: the quiet one, the promising one, and the over achiever
• Measuring Social Media Success: 3 NY Wine Stores and Social Mention
• Does the market love you or hate you? One way to find out Sentiment
• Avatar Hybrid Bodies and Wine Social Media Market Research

The conclusion I’m reaching is that to measure the success of your social media campaigns (and use social media to develop insights) you probably want a set of software tools rather than just one.

You also better have the budget to do this well cause they get expensive.

So what’s your thoughts? Please comment or ask questions below.

NB I’ll keep a watching brief on this area as the technology develops and the competition drives down prices.

Related posts:

1. Avatar Hybrid Bodies and Wine Social Media Market Research
2. Measuring Social Media Success: 3 NY Wine Stores and Social Mention
3. A Wine Retailer’s Perspective on Social Media: why bother?

The best way is to ask your customers. Another way is to gather customer insights into your business through social media research.

In the movie Avatar Sigourney Weaver is an anthropologist who was studying another community by becoming immersed in it. This post is about something similar – immersing yourself in internet communities.

The difference is we don’t use Na’vi-human hybrid bodies to interact with the natives of Pandora, rather we use the internet to get involved with other humans in their own internet environment. A little easier I think.

First some background on why I think research is important

I’m a hopelessly biased marketing professional .

I honestly believe that the world revolves around understanding what consumers want better than anyone else and then giving it to them in a profitable manner. My counterparts in operations would say it is all about making things as cheap as possible as you can’t influence price, customer service people say it is all about service, sales people say it is all about price (and service), HR says the better your staff the better your product, and finance people say it is all about margin times volume.

Of course we are all right and a good business owner makes sure he covers each area well enough to achieve his business objectives.

However this blog is all about marketing. And marketing starts at the customer.

The Customer

In order to influence how the customer acts on the internet you have to use all sorts of tools to do with search engines, social media, eCommerce conversion, internet advertising, testing and tracking as well as copy writing.

In order to understand the best way to do this you need to know how the customer thinks, and this is where research comes in.

They all think differently

Ideally you would be able to know each of your customers in the same way an old green grocer use to know each of his customers back in the 50s. Mrs Brown is busy and likes convenience food, Mrs Smith pretends she likes fresh produce but really wants any excuse to buy chocolate, Mrs Lee has just had a baby so …

As a local wine retailer you do have the advantage of having personal relationships with your customers. But it’s hard to do that for large groups of faceless consumers like those on the internet, and those who we never see and go to our competitors. We don’t meet them in-store so we cannot build a personal relationship with them as easily.

To get round this issue what marketers do is build profiles of typical customers – then “talk” to a particular profile. Through research we know that there are groups of people who are similar to Mrs Brown, Mrs Smith and Mrs Lee so we communicate to each group differently – chocolate to Mrs Smith, canned food to Mrs Brown, nappies to Mrs Lee. Or we know Mrs Lee wants to lose weight post birth so we communicate healthy weight loss messages to her.

It’s called segmentation and Constellation Wines have done this well with their Project Genome.

Wine Research

I’ve commissioned lots of professional research over the last 20 years as well as doing a fair amount of research myself over the last five years.

Frankly I often used it as an independent arbiter between the operations of a business and the customers of the business. Operations are usually sure they know exactly what customers want … and customers often want something completely different.

So rather than fight it out with subjective opinions you get a third party to actually ask customers (competitors’ as well as your own) what they really want. Then use that to make the business more customer oriented – no fights, just discussing the facts and agreeing on what should be done next.

The usual practice is to ask a research practitioner to build an overview of the market through focus groups and one on one in-depth interviews. This fleshes out the issues and is often enough to get the business focused on what the customer wants rather than what it thinks the customer wants (amazing how often that is different!).

Sometimes you go to the next step and commission expensive surveys. This use to be by telephone or mail but increasingly is by web surveys. This gets very expensive as you need a representative sample of the customer population that can be the millions large.

As I moved into working with small businesses I started to do much of this myself – mainly my own one on one interviews, but even then the recruitment effort, travel expenses and time involved was significant. Finding large enough groups of people to contact to do surveys was very problematic.

Netnography

So it was with a great deal of interest that I started to see the new method of research starting to make an appearance, it’s called netnography. It uses the burgeoning area of social networks to monitor and engage with consumers.

"What do you mean you like Chardonnay?!"

Not only are there lots of consumers in one place but they are less inhibited to say what they really think. So like the star of Avatar, ex-marine Jake Sully, you get to learn their “warrior dreamwalker ways“, er … I mean what they really think about, and how they use, the brands you are researching. They are in their natural environment (in this case in front their PC at home, not Pandora), and like Jake you are immersed in this environment.

Note unlike Avatar you are not trying to destroy their village! You are the respectful Sigourney Weaver not the evil Colonel. There are ethical research principles you abide by.

A few academics started to cotton on to internet based ethnography in the nineties. One of these was a guy called Dr Robert Koiznets.

Usually what a researcher like Robert use to do is immerse himself in a target community like a Sigourney Weaver. In the case of business research it might be a middle class family to see how they use coffee throughout the day or, in the case of academic anthropology it may be a tribe in Africa. It’s called enthonography and is a very accepted market research method.

From the jungle to the social media sphere

But Western communities started to move online in the nineties with email, forums, user groups, and of course by 2010 social media has become a huge area of our life with Facebook, blogs, twitter etc etc.

So some researchers have moved online with the various communities. In this blog I outline communities in Facebook, Twitter, Snooth, Wine-Searcher, and Blogs. All vibrant communities that each have insights into the world of wine.

What Robert and his colleagues have done is to bring the rigorousness of professional research to the internet. So rather than simply summarize what is being said (like I have), researchers study, query and analyse what these communities are saying (remember there are ethical policies in place, it ain’t sneaky).

A tribe of 100 vs tribes of 1 billion

However the issue is that there are billions of web pages and a human is unable to find, analyse and notate all relevant conversations easily. Sure you can use Google blogsearch, obvious forums and twitter search but you still have to sift through screeds of discussion threads to find the customer insight nuggets.

Software that helps

This is where NetBase has come in with a tool that finds and automatically analyzes conversations about a brand or topic. It doesn’t do everything but it is certainly a help.

Here is how Robert Kozinets puts it in a NetBase whitepaper he wrote (paraphrased).

Robert Kozinets

Netnography follows six overlapping steps:

1. Research planning – organized netnographer will need a research question, or set of questions, to direct his investigation
2. Entrée – use a focused research question to hone in, reach out, find, enter, and investigate the different online fields where a culture or community expresses and gathers.
3. Data collection – How, when, and where to collect data about the culture and community.
4. Interpretation – apply consistent, interactively-adjusted, insightful analysis and interpretation to the data.
5. Ensuring ethical standards – apply strict ethical research standards and procedures.
6. Research representation – evaluate and present the end-product of the research.

NetBase (and other software) helps out at the Data collection and Interpretation stages.

Netnography requires the researcher to investigate a huge range and volume of social data. Software tools assist with the following tasks:

1. Sourcing: allows the netnographer to scan the online environment for relevant and interaction-oriented mentions of brands, categories, product usage situations, and markets. Good tools will allow for a breadth and variety of sites. The more the better.
2. Tracking: provides some context to the data so that relevance and cultural insight can be judged. They will also provide source information (preferably hyperlinked), so that the data can be usefully traced to its source
3. Marking: allows the researcher to write and save their own notes and observations on top of the data set
4. Collecting: facilitates the archiving and collection of sets of data in ways that organize it without losing the subtlety of its cultural condition
5. Reducing: at some point, large amounts of the data need to be reduced into order to build them into coherent insights. Strong tools will be flexible, subtle, and adaptable
6. Visualizing: using different types of analysis, unexpected insights can occur when data is presented in a new visual ways
7. Pervading: with easy, user-friendly interfaces, computation tools can allow the researcher to be on top of the dynamic, ever-unfolding, naturally-occurring situation that is online interaction. Real-time consumer insights inform better and better strategic decisions.

Netnography offers a range of new insights for front end innovation, providing:

• Holistic marketplace descriptions
• Communicative and cultural comprehension
• Embedded understanding of consumer choice
• Naturalistic views of brand meaning
• Discovery of consumer innovation
• Mappings of sociocultural online space

Netnography is your secret weapon for deep strategic insights, for fresh ideas for innovation, and for new approaches to brand, campaign and community management.

WIIFM, what’s in it for me, or rather, what’s in it for you?

I’m mulling over doing a netnography project that will look to find insights that wine retailers can use to sell more wine online.

The outcome would be insights you could use to create social media marketing campaigns aimed at specific groups of people i.e. segments. In particular I’m interested in customers who buy a lot of high margin wine, the heart of a small wine businesses profitability.

However this is a big undertaking, so I’d like to get a gauge of how interested readers are. If you are interested then please let me know – by email or in the comments below. If I get enough positive response then I’ll begin.

Photos courtesy of: Wikipedia, Lets-go-shopping, Avatar – wallpaper 2000, nptrek noise to signal

Related posts:

1. America’s Most Popular Wine Store? Social Research suggests it may be BevMo
2. Measuring Social Media Success: 3 NY Wine Stores and Social Mention
3. Social Media Objectives and Wine Blogs

One company that might be able to fill those gaps is Netbase with it’s ConsumerBase product (I’ll be using it to review some big US wine stores and will do a post on this in a few days time).

It’s claim to fame is the ability to accurately measure sentiment – whether the conversations in social media love you or hate you. It uses a natural language processing algorithm that looks at the sentence structure rather than just keywords.

A couple of examples from the NetBase whitepaper, Accurately Understand Social Consumers illustrates this best.

So the structure of a sentence can make a lot of difference to the overall meaning of a phrase. Keywords by themselves can be quite misleading like anyone who uses search engines knows.

And there seems to be a continuum of search tools

The grandfathers of search, e.g. Google, use keyword phrases on websites and relevant authoritative links between websites to provide helpful results.

Another group, that includes NetBase, uses natural language processing to assess the meaning of sentences rather than just the keywords. They search numerous social media sources (e.g. blogs, twitter, facebook) and provide a summary of the results in various ways. They also provide specific results to allow you to explore the data. It is unclear to me if any of these companies weight some results higher than others like Google does with links and authoritative sources. It’s something I’ll find out.

A further group, e.g. SocialMention and Alterian SM2, searches for keywords from social media sources and summarizes data. It is targeted mainly at the PR industry and perhaps Customer Service to allow these companies to track what is being said about their brand and responding if appropriate.

So they are all doing a similar task (searching the internet for relevant results) though the later two groups are focused on social media, and are for businesses rather than consumers.

Introductory ConsumerBase Video

The Measurements

With Social Mention I was looking for a social media effectiveness measurement tool, but only expecting a simple monitoring tool (which is what I got). With ConsumerBase I’m looking for an answer to all the social media measurements I outlined in a post previously. It’s a much higher bar.

Here’s what I want from ConsumerBase,

• accurate analysis of the sentiment for wine stores and brands
• to track down who are important advocates for brands
• to track down important influencers of consumers
• track down the size of the audience relative to others
• see if, and how, the tool weights each mention e.g. a store’s promo tweet vs a wine critics’s blog post

I’m worried about whether it can be used for small brands and stores, and small geographic areas.

I also want to see how it can be used for something called netnography which is social media based market research. More of that in another post.

Price

It is very expensive at $1750+ per person per month. So I almost didn’t bother reviewing it.

However if I like it I may purchase a subscription, use it for my own research and offer it as part of my service. We’ll see – my expectations are very high!

Specific Measurements

Specifically I’m looking for these social media metrics (Altimeter Group) to see if ConsumerBase can help:

Metric: Share of Voice

• Share of Voice = Brand Mentions / Total Mentions of Brand and Competitors
• ConsumerBase – I think so

Metric: Active Advocates

• Active Advocates = (# of Active Advocates in past 30 days) / Total Advocates
• ConsumerBase – Unclear

Metric: Advocate Influence

• Advocate Influence = Unique Advocate’s Influence / Total Advocate Influence
• ConsumerBase – Unclear

Metric: Sentiment Ratio

• Sentiment Ratio = (Positive : Neutral : Negative Brand Mentions) / All Brand Mentions
• ConsumerBase – Definitely, by all accounts this is it’s major strength.

Metric: Audience Engagement (also Loyalty Objective)

• Audience Engagement = (Comments + Shares + Trackbacks) / Total Views
• ConsumerBase – Unclear

Metric: Conversation Reach

• Conversation Reach = Total People Participating / Total Audience Exposure
• ConsumerBase – I think so

Metric: Topic Trends

• Topic Trends = # of Specific Topic Mentions / All Topic Mentions
• ConsumerBase – I think so

ConsumerBase versus Social Media Monitoring Tools

Many other tools provide measures of positive and negative sentiment but they do it roughly – then “kindly” allow you to review each mention. When you have a large database of mentions you really want those to be automatically rated, not to have to review them.

So if ConsumerBase really is more accurate then it could prove a real time saver as well as insightful.

NetBase has kindly provided some data on US Wine Stores. In my next post I’ll show you the results.

Any questions or comments so far?

Related posts:

1. Find Me, Find You, Find Wine: location based services in wine stores
2. Using DoubleClick to find the best Wine Blogs
3. Avatar Hybrid Bodies and Wine Social Media Market Research