Blog 2 - Qualitative Research of Online Social Behavior

Social media is a great way for marketers to build customer relationships in today’s modern environment. Social media is a great way to make initial contact with prospective customers and strengthen relationships with existing customers. Connecting through social media can also help improve customer retention by consistently providing marketing through the users daily social life. Some social media sites marketers target are Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. 

Traditionally marketers have taken a more quantitative approach to measure their business operations matters. For example, businesses will measure the number of followers on Twitter, number of “likes” on Facebook, and amount of traffic driven to the websites. While these measures are very useful in determining important information, it lacks the relationship aspect qualitative measures can achieve. A large number of “likes” on your Facebook page can give you a false belief that people like your company, when in reality half those people might not even know what your company does. These limitations from quantitative metrics can be fixed with qualitative measures of people’s attitudes and feelings about the company. Some examples of qualitative measures include customer satisfaction, brand awareness, and individual impact, observations of behaviors, and targeting through interests. 

For example, if was targeting my group project persona for Nordstrom’s, I would ask the person to follow and like my Facebook page, send out reminders for new collections and sales, and ask for feedback on these new items. The main goal for Nordstrom would be to interact with my persona on Facebook, not simply just “like” the page.  I would want my persona to follow Nordstrom on Twitter and find ways to do promotions for her to RT Nordstrom’s. For example Nordstrom can Tweet “RT if you love the new J Brand collection” I would hope to catch my persona’s attention as J Brand is the new popular jeans she may own or want to own, thus getting the word out to her followers as well.

King Fish Media has done statistical testing on the marking of Quantitative and Qualitative data through social media. The results are shown below. (http://www.kingfishmedia.com/Portals/51063/pdf/kfm-social-media-usage-2010.pdf)

Results show us that customer relationship and identification of new customers if one of the key benefits derived from good social media strategy. Also, the research shows that the method companies use to contact their customers for marketing campaigns the most is by direct dialog.

A more well-rounded view of the target customers through social media can offer many great benefits to marketers.  It will help us develop a connection with the customers by targeting their personal needs and individual characteristics.  The ability to captivate an audience through social media is extremely possible with the new generations becoming dependent on these tools. Markets can gain dynamic insights, levels of interest, and key personal information to see what drives the brand. While there are many advantages to qualitative research, there are a few disadvantages. Quantitative analysis through social media can be labor intensive since a continual connection must be made worldwide at all times of the day making it time consuming also. In addition, the methods used may not be accepted by the public or find their results to be invalid or biased. 

Overall I think the best approach to reach a consumer is though both quantitative and qualitative marketing through social media.