Mining Social Networking Sites

Companies turn to social networking sites to find out what their customers want

Online social networking may have started out as a great way to connect with old friends or find a date, but it has since morphed into a valuable business tool that finds companies of all sizes and across all industries using it to find customers, communicate with existing clients and gain market share.

Backchannelmedia.com: April 23, 2009
Timothy R. Hawthorne

Online social networking may have started out as a great way to connect with old friends or find a date, but it has since morphed into a valuable business tool that finds companies of all sizes and across all industries using it to find customers, communicate with existing clients and gain market share.

One of the newest ways marketers can tap the power of online social networking is by simply "dropping in" on contributors to see what they're up to. Real estate agents struggling to survive in the current housing market, for example, are filtering through Twitter "tweets" (short personal updates posted regularly by members) to pick their customers' brains and find out what they want.

"Right now, this type of social networking exercise is being used in every industry imaginable," says Deborah Gray an Internet marketing and e-commerce expert at Central Michigan University. As a "buyer beware" example, she points to the National Football League's recent efforts to ferret out information about their draftees as proof.

"The NFL created a few social networking pages," says Gray, "with the goal of gaining access to draftees' personal pages, which would show if the individuals were using drugs, what their political standings were and whether they had violent tendencies." CollegeRecruiter.com reported on the "phony profile" strategy (which used photos of beautiful women to "lure in" the draftees), warning readers that team franchise personnel were checking Facebook and MySpace pages in an effort to "weed out" players that they felt wouldn't benefit their organizations, off the field.

Gray says marketers can use the same approach to, say, find out what their competitors are up to, and then use that information to fine-tune their own sales and marketing strategies. Depending on your personal taste for corporate eavesdropping, an easy first step might be to pose as a consumer, and then get "invited" into the company's network. Doing so will give you a "free pass" to view company information, videos, photos and other stuff that you wouldn't otherwise be able to access.

"If you're McDonalds, you can pose as a Burger King customer and sign up to become that competitor's affiliate," Gray suggests. "That will give you insider information on what kind of people consume the product, what they like and what they don't like." And because it's extremely difficult for companies to monitor every single new affiliate that comes through the social networking sites, the odds for success are good.

Companies looking to load up on information about their own customers and those of their competitors' should also consider setting up a Twitter account, and then "following" the microblogs of members of interest. An exercise equipment manufacturer, for example, can use the service to post its own tweets (about its newest products and innovations, for example), read the input of the members it follows, and search through all of the current postings for useful information (positive and negative tweets about its competitors' products, for instance).

Of course, having all of that information literally at your fingertips can become a burden. "Many companies lack the physical manpower necessary to keep up with what the competition and clients are doing online," says Gray, who advises companies to either hire a full-time worker to monitor, filter and disseminate the social networking data, or outsource it to another company. "Many smaller firms are just throwing the task over to the webmaster, hoping that he or she can handle it effectively. That doesn't always work."

Instead, marketers should come up with a plan for tapping the power of the social networking sites, and for actually using the information. Jeremy Robinson, creative director at boutique agency JAR Creative in Toronto, offers these tips for getting there:

Register your business on review sites like Yelp.com and monitor your business' feedback. Identify yourself as an owner and feel free to engage people. They tend to be far more honest when posting "anonymously."
Create a contest where people must answer a specific question regarding a preference or choice with regards to your product in order to enter (such as, Which color do you like better?). Run the contest on a blog that allows people to add comments in addition to their choice ("I like red because it goes with my shoes and is much better for summer," for example). "While you're at it," says Robinson, "make it another requirement that they have to 'tweet' the contest to 10 different friends as an entry requirement."
Join a LinkedIn group that caters to your target market and post a question like, "What's been your experience in outsourcing online marketing? What pricing models have you encountered? Any horror stories that you can share? What's the most important factor you're looking at? Any feedback appreciated!" Such questions will evoke responses that you can then use to tweak your own go-to-market strategy.
Finally, utilize the power of Twitter and simply post a question point-blank to your followers, many of whom will be more than happy to give you their "two cents" on the issue.
With social networking growing in leaps and bounds, and ranging from broad-based options like Facebook and Twitter, as well as niche-oriented resources, expect to see more marketers using the resource to find out everything they can about their target markets and competitors. The process may be time-consuming and could yield more information that you know what to do with, but in the end even the tiniest nugget of competitive intelligence gleaned online could pay off.