Branding, Culture, Politics, and Everything in Between

While companies are still somewhat figuring out what to do with social media, one of the most immediate benefits that companies have recognized has been Twitter’s value in customer service. Customers are usually notoriously bad at giving feedback, so services like Twitter are very valuable for companies wishing to understand how their service processes work. It’s a low-hanging fruit even for the more timid companies to get started with social media. But I think there’s an even more important benefit of social media that will prove immediately valuable for companies once they get into it: the use of social media in doing qualitative consumer research.

Very recently there have been two rather important books written relating to the subject either directly or indirectly. The first one is “Chief Culture Officer” by Grant McCracken, which came out just over a week ago. The second one is “Netnography” by Robert Kozinets, which is still in print. McCracken’s book argues for the necessity to create an organization that “gets” culture, or at least have somebody in the organization who does. An organization should be aware of its and its brands’ place in culture to manage its meaning (and most of all, not to mismanage it!). Kozinets’ book on the other hand is – as the name suggests – about how to do ethnographic research online. It’s intended for researchers and companies alike. Of course, Kozinets’ book also has some arguments as to why a company should do this kind of research, but as a general rule I’d say that McCracken’s book is more about the “why” and Kozinets’ is more about the “how” of uncovering a brand’s meaning.

I haven’t had the time to read either book completely (there are free previews available, check the sites), so apologies if the following arguments are featured in the books and I seem like I’m passing them as my own (I’m not). Also apologies for either author if they felt misrepresented in the the “why/how” categorization above.

In the past, only a few companies (usually big ones) actively engaged in ethnographic research. To some degree it was a matter of a unappreciation for cultural aspects of the brand, but for many companies I’d guess engaging in ethnographic research may have been just too costly or time consuming to do. You’d need to commission a research team, arrange the interviews or field work dates and then wait a rather long time for them to decode the findings and write a report, and even then you couldn’t be sure you had enough data. And sometimes you’d have to do is in multiple locations if you were a global brand. To put in simple terms: it just wasn’t worth the ROI for many companies.

This is where a method like netnography comes in. If anything, social media sites offer an almost endless stream of different and rich cultural meanings – especially for brands – that can be accessed quite quickly. If a skilled researcher spends an afternoon scouring through social media sites, he or she will have at least a preliminary feel for a brand’s meaning at the end of the day. This I think is another benefit of netnography for companies: to be able to do scale your qualitative research projects from “quick and dirty” with limited but somewhat relevant results to large scale meaning mining. I have my reservations about Twitter, but its value in getting a quick feel for your brand’s meaning is invaluable. Twitter really is zeitgeist on tap. Status updates on Twitter (or Facebook) are what McCracken calls “phatic communications” or to quote McCracken:

This is communication with little hard, informational content, but lots of emotional and social content. Phatic communications doesn’t get much said, but it has social effects so powerful, it gets lots done.

I suspect both McCracken and Kozinets would cringe if the principal arguments for buying their books were “doing qualitative research is faster and cheaper now”, but I think this is an important perspective as well. If anything it’s a good additional selling point to get your company at least consider taking qualitative research more seriously. If you need more convincing about the importance of qualitative research, I’m sure both books have more than plenty compelling arguments. My guess that in the future companies will have a netnography team or a “cultural social media team” sitting next to the social media customer service team they have in place.

Here are the book covers to help you spot them on the bookshelf.