Brands are not Magic Words
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Aug 09, 2010
It’s easy to think that when someone mentions your brand name on a web site that it is the magic word, the abracadabra or open sesame, that signals they are willing to talk you. And for 59% it is, according to the Vovici social media listening survey. But that still leaves four out of ten consumers who don’t want to be bothered by you about their comment. They made their comment about your brand to a particular audience, of which you aren’t a part. (See Consumers Don't Want to Hear from Social Media Researchers, Unless...) So much for magic.
Now think of Gandalf saying mellon in the movie The Fellowship of the Ring, to open the gates of the lost dwarf kingdom of Moria. Some magic words, like that one, only work in certain places. And whether a consumer is willing to be contacted about a specific comment about a product or service varies depending on where they made that comment.
We asked 426 U.S. online consumers, “Assume you make a comment about a product or service to each of the following sites. Which sites, if any, would it be appropriate for third parties to follow up with you about?” (The actual choices that a respondent saw varied depending on which sites they said they used.)
Consumers were most open to contacts through online stores or their blog. They were least open to contact through social networking sites: the exception being Twitter, which acted more like a blog than a social networking site in these answers (it is, after all, sometimes called a microblog). Still, two-thirds to four-fifths of respondents didn’t want to be contacted about their product/service comments on any these sites.
What’s the way forward for market researchers wanting to engage with consumers? As Ben Smithee of Spych Market Analytics put it, “We do ourselves a great disservice by incorrectly utilizing the social media realm for market research. Instead, for those of us that are forming true relationships and trust with people (notice I didn't say respondents) we are providing a great value to both the consumers and the companies. In that aspect we are being neither intrusive nor inflammatory.”
It is going to take time for us to work our magic on consumers. Ben points out the need for researchers to be trusted agents in the social media world. If you want them to respond to your requests for contact, you need to be sharing and responding as well. The riddle Gandalf solved was “Speak, friend, and enter,” and the magic word mellon was really just Elvish for “friend”. This is the same riddle we need to solve as researchers.