Ryan MacMillan

e-Commerce has greatly affected our behaviour as consumers. Last Christmas, Amazon saved me from the horrors of the last-minute Oxford Street reenactment of the Black Hole of Calcutta in which I traditionally play a role (third Sweating Man in Hennes Queue from stage-left). I ordered all my presents on the site and they appeared, gift-wrapped at my girlfriend’s house in Belfast several days before I did. Lovely.

We all know that a lot of people shop on the internet but eMarketer suggested last month that there are far more people conducting research online before scrumming it on the high street to buy, than there are purchasing online. At the same time, I read a claim by BIGresearch that the influence of new media on purchase decisions is increasing rapidly, while traditional media’s influence is plummeting. New media, you say? Well, internet advertising decreased slightly but our old friend blogging sits just under the top of the highest chart climbers, with a 21.5% growth between 2006 and 07.

Brands interested in monitoring and measuring this social media activity can gain some useful insights into it for free by using several online tools available for public use. These tools employ various metrics and serve different utilities, but a balanced use of them should provide a useful depiction of the conversational landscape. We regularly use social media to conduct research to find out who’s saying what, where they’re saying it and to what extent others are listening. I recently took a look at the conversation surounding the consumer electronics industry - here’s a summary of some of my findings.

Using a couple of major consumer television brands as examples, say Sony Bravia and Panasonic Viera, I took a quick look at how active and influencial the brands appear to be in the social media sphere. Guessing at the major keywords which might typically pop up in consumers’ conversations relating to those brands - “sony” + “bravia” + “deals”, “panasonic” + “viera” + “features”, etc. - I entered them into a couple of major social media evaluation tools to see what trends emerged.

- On Technorati, the hub of the world’s blogs, a quick search showed there to have been far more chatter surrounding Sony than Panasonic. I decided to look only at the first five search results pages for each brand, which took me back about 30 days for Bravia but 80 days for Viera. The infamous Bravia adverts brought up the most results for Sony but there was a fair amount being discussed about good deals and new products too. Viera’s strongest point was in new products.

- Over at Delicious, the social bookmarking site, Sony again scored much higher than Panasonic, with the latter showing almost no activity. The adverts were the big topic once more but deals featured strongly too.

- Nielsen’s free blog activity yard-stick, Blogpulse, generated some telling charts for both brands. Sony over the last month was particularly strong on price and features; Panasonic, with again much lower activity, needed a longer timescale to show a spike at the start of the year, greatest for design.

This kind of free research doesn’t negate the need for proper paid-for conversational monitoring research in certain circumstances but it is a useful starting point. I’m sure we’ll blog about this much more in the coming weeks, and there’s a juicy essay on the subject coming out in our imminent Special Report for Contagious, which will - ahem - be on sale soon folks.