Our office here in Cambridge, MA is blessed with talent from all parts of the country.  As a result of our mixed geographical heritage, few topics are as hotly debated in the office this time of year as pro football and coffee chains.  After a recent debate on the latter topic in which every side claimed that ‘most people’ agreed with them, we decided to take a peek at the online conversation and see if our assumptions were reflected in reality.

Deciding to limit ourselves for the time-being to Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks, we analyzed over 230,000 blog and forum posts from June 1 to yesterday in an attempt to settle the debate whether internet’s perceptions of these brands matched our own.   We analyzed content every day, but summarized the results as the conversation was fairly stable  over that time.  Dunkin’ Donuts, as a mainly regional player had about 10%  of the volume of its much larger peer.

As those who have grown up in the Northeast know, DD is much-beloved local institution and 14% of the conversation were  general exclamations of love.   Those who had moved away from the region and missed their local shop were especially passionate in their praise for the chain.    Matching our own experience in the office, a large number of people (17%) mentioned Dunkin’ as a regular fixture of their daily routine;  particularly for morning coffee runs.

A number of Dunkin’ customers weren’t as satisfied with the experience of grabbing their coffee – complaints about sloppy service emerged quickly as a theme.  However, the regional devotion to DD’s syrupy take on coffee far outweighed the complaints.   We knew about the coffee but in training our analysis algorithm we were surprised at the amount of love for DD’s low-cal flatbread sandwiches and praise for their taste / calorie ratio.

Not everyone was impressed by DD’s commitment to their health, with 18% complaining about the caloric content of their baked goods.

Starbucks managed to avoid major health complaints despite Starbucks’ fattening drinks, which owned the cravings of many posters.   Their regular coffee, on the other hand, did not feature nearly as prominently or as well, with a category of negative posts specifically about the coffee and only a scattered few posts in praise of it (we rolled these compliments into the ‘Other Positive’ category.)  Despite the lack of enthusiasm about the basic coffee, a significant slice of the conversation mentioned Starbucks as part of daily routine as well.   For us, its position less than a block away trumps any concerns for pleasing our taste buds during our caffeine fixes.

Commenters also complained somewhat about the price of Starbucks’ offerings, long a symbol of casual decadence, but perhaps not as much as we expected.  An equivalent number of people felt that Starbucks was ‘evil’ on account of their scale, competitiveness with local business, and homogeneity. (The company is addressing this)  Not exactly shocking for us, as the DD proponents usually bring up the Austin Powers reference at least once an argument.

These complaints were minor compared to the biggest surprise to come out of the analysis:  that such a large number of Starbucks customers are vocal and satisfied with the shops’ ambiance (Good Experience.)  We read a number of posts by students who appreciated Starbucks as a study space and stressed out moms who sought it as a daily sanctuary.  The Seattle-based company has long emphasized this component of their brand, and it appears that their attention to the details of everything from the furniture to the music continues to pay dividends.

We haven’t managed to settle any internal debates here with this analysis, and no money changed hands on the side bets, but at least next time we’ll have proper statistics to hurl at one another.  Or possibly just stick to debating whether the Vikings are overrated.

Tags: brand, brand monitoring, data, research by edward
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Crimson Hexagon’s battle of the brands series highlights how consumers feel about the brands they interact with on a regular basis.  Applying this lens to social media content is intriguing because it provides unique access to the ever-elusive “voice of the customer.”  While conventional social media monitoring tools can’t focus on this level of detail, Crimson Hexagon’s underlying science can quantify abstract concepts without keywords.

For our second head-to-head match-up, we looked at two brands of pain reliever that are in most household medicine cabinets: Tylenol and Advil.  With the FDA announcement about the risks of acetaminophen earlier this summer and the widespread discussion about the H1N1 virus (Swine Flu), there is no shortage of conversation, advice, and opinion about these brands online.

We analyzed opinions about Tylenol and Advil from April 1^st to September 6^th of this year.  Using our technology, we focused on customers’ experiences with the medications, drawing from blogs, forums, and public Facebook and MySpace content.  Here’s what we found:

Themes in Online Conversation: Tylenol & Advil

Brand Focus: Tylenol

Brand Focus: Advil

• Advil is primarily associated with strong pain relief, especially for headaches (60% combined), while Tylenol has more varied discussion.
• Overall people seem to think that Tylenol is safer.  More people (18% vs. 9%) trust Tylenol enough to give it to their children.  While there is conversation about the risks associated with each product, only Tylenol also inspires discussion about its safety and gentleness (8%).  6% of people talk about Tylenol as the brand their doctor recommends while no detectable proportion of the Advil conversation points to a doctor’s recommendation.

Trends over time: Tylenol

NOTE: Spike corresponds to FDA recommendation on lower maximum dosage for acetaminophen (June 30, 2009)

• When the FDA announced a recommendation to lower dosages of acetaminophen, the main active ingredient in Tylenol, conversation briefly spiked as people became concerned about Tylenol and liver damage, then fell back to its original levels.

Tags: brand, brand monitoring by Megan Costello
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Among the many uses of Crimson Hexagon’s technology, analyzing how consumers feel about a particular brand is one of the most interesting to us. Part of the appeal is how hard such sentiment is to measure through conventional means; part of it is how social media provides a window on what consumers really think in their day-to-day conversations.  It’s also that this application makes particular use of one feature of our technology – the ability to quantify abstract concepts instead of just keywords – that is entirely unique to our underlying science.

To spotlight this we’re starting an occasional blog series called “The Battle of the Brands”.  We’ll choose two (and sometimes maybe three) competing brands and analyze how they’re discussed in the online conversation, quantifying the range of opinions and perceptions that shape the online brand identity.

Our first head-to-head will be none other than Walmart versus Target.   With the recent news of Target’s planned increase in marketing spend , we started thinking: are the online perceptions of each brand consistent with the concerns expressed by Target?  And how will this increase in marketing spending impact those opinions?

We analyzed online opinions about Walmart and Target from July 15^th to September 3rd. Using our technology, we focused on customers’ opinion about the shopping experience, drawing from blogs, forums, Tweets, and public Facebook and MySpace content.  Here’s what we found:

Target (all opinions)

Walmart (all opinions)

• Overall, the online conversation about Walmart was chiefly critical, breaking down into 61% negative and 39% positive.  Target enjoyed 75% positive reactions with only 25% negative opinions.

• People talk about the social implications of shopping at Walmart (Bad for Local Business, Treats Employees Poorly categories), but when talking about Target focus on their actual shopping experience.

Walmart (shopping conversation only)

• The motivations for shopping at each retailer are vastly different:   People shop at Walmart because they’re looking for cheap staples.   At Target they feel that can get great stuff (Love this Product, Awesome Clothes categories) for a low price.  Customers get more excited about shopping at Target, but, a larger percentage finds Walmart to be a better bet for low prices.

Walmart is currently seen as the brand delivering the basics at low prices, but price comes at a cost in quality of products and services. Fortunately for Walmart, being seen as the low cost provider buoys the brand during tough economic times.  Target, on the other hand, is the brand that delivers a more enjoyable shopping experience, with more excitement expressed for products and deals.  However, this may not be the best attribute to reinforce when consumers are “tightening their belts” and “getting back to basics”.  The interesting aspect of this battle will come when the economy and consumer confidence starts to pick up.  Will the tables turn for Target and Walmart?  How can these two brand giants balance their core brand attributes to win over consumers in the good times and bad?  And as Target executes expensive marketing campaigns, how will they measure whether their investment is having the intended impact?

Tags: brand, brand monitoring, product by Megan Costello
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The Twitterverse was decidedly more positive than negative on the Microsoft/Yahoo! search deal, with 14% citing the ongoing battle with Google, and 13% calling it some variant of a great match. Only 8% of tweets were neutral or negative on the announcement.

The largest single share of the Tweet volume (47%) was the ripple of the news itself as it proliferated through the network.

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• Microsoft and Yahoo partner to share the search pain (geardiary.com)
• Microsoft-Yahoo vs. Google (thestar.com)
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Tags: brand, brand monitoring, opinosphere by mike
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Microsoft. The Borg, right?

Not anymore, at least according to Vox Twitter on a host of recent issues.

It started with Bing, which a slim majority of Twitter-ers between June 29 and July 13 – but a majority nonetheless – generally liked:

Bing Opinion Monitor Chart

Next came Google’s Chrome OS announcement, which as discussed in a prior post, yielded an almost audible “meh” from vox Twitter. 19% of topical tweets between June 29 and July 13 were generally unimpressed, and the largest single theme of the conversation conveyed the sense that Chrome was no threat to the OS powers that be, foremost among which is Microsoft:

Chrome OS Opinion Monitor

Yesterday’s response to Office 2010 is the clincher. A combined 71% of twitter traffic was positive for Microsoft. The nature of that positive response is interesting… 14% cited the free and online character of the offering, and 16% Microsoft’s innovation in the cloud. 1 in 5 expressed a variant of excitement and/or love for it, and 21% cited it, specifically, as a threat to Google:

If Twitter is, as some feel, a leading indicator of the fickle flows of sentiment among the influential digerati, the last few weeks may have witnessed a sea change with far reaching implications… both in Redmond, and in Mountain View.

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• Clash of the titans (economist.com)

Tags: brand, brand monitoring, opinosphere by mike
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Really feeling the love from the folks at CNN.com now… Today’s segment on what Twitter has to say about the current summer blockbusters…

Tags: brand, company, customer voice, marketing, social web by mike
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Wondering how people feel about the Federal government’s intervention in General Motors? We were too.

If you want to know how many times the words “General Motors” have been used online, there are lots of folks who can help you. If you’re interested in the polling results of this site or that one, there are plenty to choose from.

But if you want to understand what the online conversation really means, you might be interested in this…

Tags: brand, company, news, opinosphere, politics by mike
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Today, brands have unprecedented access to their audiences. No longer reliant solely on research intermediaries conducting periodic focus groups and surveys, marketers now hear directly from their brand’s consumers. Via social media amplification, brands can quickly see how consumers are reacting to a social network redesign, or to an abrupt termination of a spokesman.

Many organizations are using this access to reach out and connect with constituencies—sometimes with surprising results. Back in 2007, Greenpeace asked its fans to help name (and save) a humpback whale. Internet users rejected mellifluous names like Libertad and Mira in favor of the less dignified (and arguably hilarious) Mr. Splashypants.

Similarly, this week, NASA’s poll for the new wing of a national space station allowed a write-in option. Comedian Stephen Colbert urged his viewers to submit his name, and Colbert was the winner in a landslide.

All this raises an interesting question: how much should your brand assets become a democracy? Indisputably, brands can be shaped by their consumers and audiences as never before. But when core assets are handed over, does the community risk becoming a mob? Or does an engaged community trump all? Henry Ford was famously at the other end of the spectrum with this attributed remark on user input: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Photo credit: Richard.Fisher

Tags: brand, social web, uh oh by admin
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SXSW in Twitter conversations, March 2009

While it’s fashionable to decry the actual panels, there was some interesting conversation at this year’s SXSW that didn’t take place at the Salt Lick. The best formal panel I attended described the integrated marketing effort behind Electronic Arts’ Dead Space. EA overcame an internal bureaucracy to put together a content-driven marketing approach that included both an interactive web experience and a comic book illustrated by Ben Templesmith. EA incurred tremendous cost in content creation and orchestration with so many moving parts (and plot lines), but the user engagement more than paid off with over a million games sold in 2008.

A prevalent conference theme was that social is an undisputed growth area for traditional brands, as Monday’s Forrester report Social Media Playtime Is Over (account required) points out. Brands like Walmart and Pepsi were out in force at SXSW, capitalizing on the authenticity, reach, and mindshare that influential bloggers like 11 Moms and Chris Brogan bring to bear. While the dollar spend is still comparatively low, Forrester is counseling brands to move beyond the experimentation stage and develop management strategies for social in the long term.  The next step in social for the enterprise is to develop the listening capability and social marketing metrics that demonstrate how social efforts convert to consumer preference and purchases.

Tags: brand, events, social web by admin
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A nation seeking an escape from bad economic news, a massively popular Olympian, and drug use were an obvious recipe for a tabloid sensation.  So when the photo of Michael Phelps hunched over a bong hit the news, the social media reaction was predictably huge.

YouTube mined the funnier side of the episode while a number of blogger tackled the allegations a bit more seriously.

At the start of the month, the incident threatened to cast a pall the greatest story in sports since Lance Armstrong’s 7th Tour de France win. Kellogg’s pulled Phelps’s endorsement deal, removing the Corn Flakes box from his overburdened trophy case. Kellogg’s may have damaged their brand with the move, and one social media indicator we measured reveals that damage to Phelps’s reputation may have been fleeting.

Using Twitter to gauge the digerati’s reaction to the affair, it appears the verdict on Phelps’ behavior is a collective shrug.  Supportive Tweets for Phelps outnumbered criticism 2:1 consistently since the news broke at the start of the month.  That figure rises to 4:1 if one includes criticism of marijuana laws and their enforcement by the Richland County sheriff spurred by the incident.  In particular, the contrasting treatment of A-Rod’s steroid allegations anchored  assertions that drug enforcement is inconsistent or illogical.

In recent days, volume has slowed to a trickle as the story has come to a conclusion  with no charges being filed against Phelps.  The swimmer remains suspended from competition and has withdrawn temporarily from the public eye. However, based on Twitter I’d say the swimmer will be able to easily forget this one, even without lighting up.

Tags: brand, social web, uh oh by edward
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