Online Intelligence

Applying human experience, expertise and automation to Social Listening.

Our approach to Online Intelligence

Social media platforms and other online spaces have become increasingly indispensable forums for public conversation – and so have become invaluable places to gather social insights.

What is Online Intelligence / Social Listening?

One popular form of Online Intelligence – often called “Social Listening” (although it’s not limited to social media platforms) – focuses on analyzing publicly-available online discussion to gain insight into consumer and citizen attitudes, opinions and behaviours. Social Listening differs from social media content performance analysis as it allows you to look beyond audience responses on your owned social channels. It gives a wider view of how Canadians are discussing a brand, product, industry, event or issue. Importantly, this discussion is organic: unprompted by marketers or researchers.

The data Social Listening considers is unstructured data that online participants generate in any online space (including but not limited to social platforms, news article comment sections and discussion forums). But the analysis itself is highly structured, using a rigorous and systematic approach to a varied and wide-ranging data set – all in pursuit of credible insights generation. Researchers may, for example, identify and quantify recurring themes or sentiments, or measure where signals are originating or circulating online. Social Listening also has the advantage of being able to look ‘back in time’ and understand fluctuations in opinions on particular topics, including your brand or organization. This is especially useful for organizations that have undergone significant change or received extensive media coverage related to an action or event.

How we conduct and analyize Online Intelligence / Social Listening?

The Social Listening offerings of Environics Research provide both quantitative and qualitative solutions and can be conducted on an as-needed basis or as part of regular monitoring. We go beyond using software tools to simply scrape and synthesize data on a dashboard. Instead, we use a combination of human experience and automation to eliminate spam, bots and “noisy” signals, evaluate a datasets for signs of manipulation or malicious intentions, and focus on identifying accurate themes and sentiment in ways that no software tool can achieve on its own. In addition to capturing key trends – such as number of brand mentions, where conversations are happening and how conversations are changing over time – we add context and define actionable insights, link insights from the online analysis to your organization’s needs and goals.

Our analysis can include comparisons of perceptions of your organization, product or brand to those of competitors, resonance monitoring of media coverage relevant to your industry, comment sentiment analysis, as well as content analysis to better understand trending topics and how audiences feel about them.

Organizations should not limit their social media awareness to the online spaces they control directly. There is tremendous value in analyzing content and conversations beyond your management. While it’s important to understand how your own social media content is resonating with your audiences, it’s also very useful to understand the social media landscape of your competitors or other key players in your sector.

With Competitor Social Media Content Monitoring, you gain insight into your competitors’ social strategies and how well they are performing with audiences – awareness that can help you build competitive advantage. Equipped with knowledge of how others’ online messaging is resonating, you’re better prepared to develop engaging social content strategies that can connect with a wider audience interested in your sector.

We can help you explore your social media landscape – including dynamics related to key competitors’ online presence – using a one-time audit or ongoing monitoring, conducted and reported at your desired cadence. Depending on your needs and priorities, we develop a set of criteria against which to evaluate competitor content performance, surfacing their messaging and social strategies and identifying their successes and challenges.

Typically, our Competitor Social Media Content Monitoring work includes:
– Thematic categorization of content by post type, subject matter and areas of emphasis.
– Insight into competitor social media strategy and objectives.
– Evaluation of content performance with a qualitative lens (examining unique creative outputs) as well as a quantitative lens (through benchmarking of performance metrics).

This kind of analysis is versatile and can achieve a wide range of objectives. Our industry expertise and consulting capabilities are important to the process, helping you establish goals for the research and a plan for achieving them. We pride ourselves on delivering actionable recommendations tailored to your business problems.

Online Intelligence is a valuable supplement to traditional market research, capturing your audience’s in-the-moment reactions and gauging the resonance of your social media marketing efforts. It helps to illuminate the candid sentiments of your audience, giving you an understanding of how they are talking about or reacting to the issues of the day.

Of our several Online Intelligence offerings, Owned Social Media Content Monitoring is usually the obvious place to start: What is your organization putting out there and is it resonating with your audience?

Whether through a one-time audit or through ongoing monitoring, we can help you understand and quantify the results of your team’s social media efforts. We look at the performance of your original output, as well as reactions to the content.

Owned Social Media Content Monitoring analysis often includes:
– Social platform-specific performance metrics to measure exposure and engagement, such as impressions, comments, shares, views, etc.
– Creating averages and benchmarks to evaluate content performance and pinpoint what types of content over- or under-perform.
– Sentiment analysis of responses to your content, to better understand how your posts are resonating with your audience, as well as tracking key themes and perspectives.

Environics Research will collaborate with both your internal team and external content agencies to share performance results and actionable insights on what works – and what doesn’t – with your audiences as well as how to make the most of your social content and social spending. Understanding what resonates with your audience helps your team produce higher-performing and more cost-effective social content.

Our consultants also understand the unique characteristics of each social platform, and can highlight specific challenges, opportunities and dynamics. Content that performs well on one channel may underperform on another. Combing our platform knowledge with insights about your strategy and audiences, we can help your team develop platform-specific content strategies and best practices.