Member Avatar for MktgRob

I am sure that some people do this in informal ways but are there any companies that you know of or work for that actively use social media and online communities to gather market research? I just read a quick blog post about Domino's Pizza doing this and I wonder if this is a new wrinkle of formal social media marketing planning.

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Short summary and practical next steps for anyone turning forum chatter into repeatable research. As noted, a lot of this starts informally; as pointed out, people often begin by hand. Treat social channels as observational panels — great for uncovering themes, language, pain points and emerging ideas, but not automatically representative. First define the business question and the success metric you’ll use to act on an insight.

A compact, repeatable workflow to use right away:

  • Define objective, audience and time window.
  • Select channels and build inclusive search expressions (brand terms, synonyms, misspellings) plus exclusions for noise.
  • Collect, de-duplicate and filter bots/spam.
  • Manually code a sample to train automated classifiers.
  • Triangulate with sales, surveys or experiments and convert themes into testable hypotheses.

Example of a simple boolean-style query to start refining (adjust terms and exclusions for your case):

("BrandX" OR brandx OR "brand x") AND (buy OR order OR review OR complaint) -("jobs" OR "careers" OR "coupon")

Practical analysis tips and cautions: automatic sentiment is useful for trends but trips over sarcasm, negation and niche slang — always hand-check a purposive sample. Watch for volume spikes driven by a single popular post or bot network; normalize by reach or influencer weight rather than raw mention counts. Use rolling windows to spot emerging issues versus one-off events. If results matter commercially, validate with a small survey or an A/B test before changing product or messaging.

Ethics and deliverables: follow platform terms, anonymize private content, and store minimal PII. Present findings as: prioritized themes, representative quotes (anonymized), suggested experiments, and leading indicators to track. Start small, document your queries and decisions, iterate — manual review early on saves a lot of noisy automation later.

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Member Avatar for InsightsDigital

Definitely!!! I personally have used social media as a research tool to develop qualitative findings on consumers' intent, mindset, sentiments, atitudes, and most of all plan/shape their buying behavior or attitude towards a brand. I did this manually back in 2007 and earlier before the advent of many research tools. Now, there are many tools that does this, however, even if these tools are still very good, there are certain results which should not be in those categories.

Some of the tools out there are: Radian6, Techrigy, BuzzMetrics, BuzzLogic, to name a few

Member Avatar for MktgRob

Definitely!!! I personally have used social media as a research tool to develop qualitative findings on consumers' intent, mindset, sentiments, atitudes, and most of all plan/shape their buying behavior or attitude towards a brand. I did this manually back in 2007 and earlier before the advent of many research tools. Now, there are many tools that does this, however, even if these tools are still very good, there are certain results which should not be in those categories.

Some of the tools out there are: Radian6, Techrigy, BuzzMetrics, BuzzLogic, to name a few

For myself, I have done research in the Social Media channels on a very informal way and probably not at the same level as you or Domino's. Thanks for the heads up on the tools. Will definitely come in handy!

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