Brand perception is not static. Consumer attitudes are constantly shifting, and social media conversations reflect these changes. Insights from social media conversations can help brands identify and close potential gaps between what it strives to be and how people actually perceive it.
Consider what happened to Applebee’s on Reddit last year. A thread titled “What restaurant have you sworn to never return to and why?” devolved into a 5000-reply rant about the casual dining chain, as redditors condemned Applebee’s for what they said was miserable customer service and subpar food. The company, which brands itself as “a dependable and enjoyable neighborhood grill and bar,” was startled to learn of the discrepancy between its branding and these reports of customers’ experience.
Applebee’s is by no means alone. Brands such as Audi, Dove and Pepsi have been taken to task on social for missing the mark with their creative or branding.
Social media is a living, breathing, uncontrolled focus group. People volunteer their ratings, thoughts, frustrations, experiences and judgments about products, services, industries and larger consumer and societal challenges. These insights can arm companies with innovative ideas and provide the honest feedback they need to resolve and curb customer concerns before they irreversibly impact brand perception and, in turn, sales.
At the same time, social media can allow unverified, gossipy and outright false stories about people, places and businesses to spread like wildfire, damaging reputations along the way. The rise to prominence of fringe networks like 4Chan underscores the challenges that CMOs face in 2019 if they do not better understand the social landscape.
To bridge the gap between perception and reality—and between what’s fair and what’s fake—brands need to rethink their approach to social with three important considerations in mind.
Look at the full picture
From tweets and employee Glassdoor reviews to Reddit threads and obscure discussion boards, consumer insights are everywhere. Brands are remiss if they monitor conversations only on mainstream social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
Brand perceptions are born and grow in many places across the social web, including some you may never have heard of. In niche online social circles, consumers may reveal the factors behind their decision to buy or not buy your product, or how they really feel about an experience with your brand. It is from these far-flung corners of the internet that customer testimonials can emerge as reputational threats—or missed opportunities for growth—if brands continue to ignore them.
Understand the flow of information
Brand perceptions do not form in silos. Communities aren’t isolated on just one or two well-known platforms.
A brand’s target audience is dispersed across multiple channels and information flows across all of these different platforms. By drawing connections between conversations across platforms, niche forums and social and online media, you can get a more complete picture of consumer attitudes.
Take qualitative approaches to qualitative challenges
Share-of-voice metrics and word clouds do not capture all the emotions and nuance within social conversations.
To understand the unique challenges and frustrations your consumers are facing, or the word-of-mouth chatter (true or not) that’s building around your brand’s identity, using technology alone is not enough. A human lens is crucial when examining human attitudes and character.
Making sense of the raw, unfiltered conversations on social media to glean actionable consumer insights takes thoughtful analysis and social media expertise. Sifting through hundreds of thousands of comments and testimonials in disparate locations across the web requires marrying quantitative approaches with qualitative, human analysis. It needs an elevated understanding of the complexity and interplay of the platforms and sites that compose the social media landscape.
While actual social chatter is impossible to predict, it’s safe to say that monitoring and analyzing social conversation can head off issues down the road. Rather than being just a channel for cost-efficient advertising or customer service, social can be a channel to understand customers proactively. And that’s the clearest way to match perception and reality.
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Sharb Farjami is the CEO of Storyful, a global social media intelligence agency that partners with news and business organizations to make sense of social. It is a division of News Corp. He previously served as director of content commercialization at Foxtel in Sydney, Australia.
