MARKETPLACE ONLINE RESEARCH: Make trends and influence people.

Internet-savvy consumers post, blog and tweet about everything - including the products and services they buy. It's an information goldmine - if you know how to listen. By Sean Hargrave

Social media is now firmly established as a channel through which brands can win 'friends' and see if people 'like' what they are doing as well as discover if their conversations are worthy of a 'follow' and a 'retweet'.

While such metrics can be flattering, brands are now discovering that if they are a part of this conversation on social media channels, the real advance can be gaining a better insight into their customers and their peer groups. By listening in to, and being active in, social media conversations, brands are realising that there is a lot more to market research than standing in a shopping mall with a clipboard or emailing recent purchasers a list of questions about their likelihood to return online.

Kate Whittaker, strategy manager at Debenhams, is typical of marketers at the cusp of using social media, and is building on the GoRecommend service the retailer is currently using to secure positive Facebook posts.

"We do a lot of online market research with our customers to find out where we have done well and where they think there may be room for improvement," she says.

"We've started allowing those who enjoyed their last visit to the store the option, at the end of the online questionnaire, to automatically post a message about their good experience on their Facebook page. It gets us around 650 posts a month that have the potential to be seen by, we estimate, around 100,000 people.

"What we now want to do is go a bit deeper and look at the conversations people are having about Debenhams unprompted by conventional market research."

The work will bring the retailer in line with many leading-edge brands and organisations that are discovering that by moving away from questionnaires and participating in more natural conversations they can reveal aspects of their services and products they might not have otherwise discovered.

Visit Wales is a case in point. Visitors to the newly redeveloped Welsh Assembly tourism site will find a special section on dog-friendly holidays. Visit Wales' social media agency, iCrossing, discovered people were interested in taking pet-friendly breaks but the site did not have appropriate content, as Jon Munro, digital marketing manager at Visit Wales reveals.

"We used our Facebook and Twitter following to ask people what they wanted out of holidays in Wales," he says. "We knew we were popular for niche activities such as walking, but the really big feedback was that pet-friendly holidays were popular. So we tested through search campaigns to see if it would provide traffic that would convert. This all worked well and now it's a section of the Visit Wales site."

Listening to online conversations and getting feedback from its team of social media customer services experts has proved successful for Dell, too. The computer manufacturer uses lessons learned from customer feedback as well as suggestions offered through social media and its own website to refine products and decide what new lines should be launched. Maribel Sierra, director of global social media and communities at Dell, points out this has led to many product and customer service improvements.

"We had a recent issue where we were able to listen in to social media buzz about a laptop that was getting hot," she says. "So our engineers managed to find out it was because of a hinge that was turning off a fan, and we fixed the problem and put out guidance for our users within a couple of hours.

"We've also picked up on social media suggestions on Facebook, Twitter and the Idea Storm section of our website to launch our Product Red line of computers."

The Product Red range comprises a laptop and a printer that include a donation from Dell to the Product Red campaign to eradicate HIV/Aids in newborn babies in Africa by 2015.

"We've also improved connectivity on some of our machines and started pre-installing Linux," Sierra says. "By listening to what people have been telling us, we can improve our range."

For leading tea brand Tetley, social media has been a new means for marketers to check that their assumptions about the core brand are correct, and even led to the company amending the timing of its communications with key followers. Anand Gandesha, Tetley marketing manager, reveals that the brand wanted to work with its agency, MediaVest, in social media to ensure that its recent decision to bring back the Tea Folk in television adverts was correct.

"We've reached out and engaged with Tetley's target audience of housewives aged 25-55 and Tea Folk has attracted 115,000 Facebook fans, of whom 75% are active users participating on the page in the last month," he says.

"We've been asking for ideas around content, merchandising and PR, and it's great to have them so willing to participate. This showed us we were right to bring back the Tea Folk and we've even seen people picking their own favourite characters and defending them from criticism in chats.

"We've also learned through our social media work that the nature of tea breaks has changed. They tend to be taken online now, so we've been planning updates of Tea Folk's media content around tea break times of 3-4pm in the afternoon and 10-11am in the morning."

This idea of listening in to social media buzz has gone a step further at Rentokil. The pest-control firm is not only offering advice on how to deal with pests mentioned in conversations, but is utilising reports to literally map out bug infestations. These conversations, which are picked up by listening and tracking services from Sentiment Metrics, are not only bringing the brand closer to its customers, but are also encouraging enquiries for pest control services, according to Alicia Holbrook, social media manager at Rentokil. "We don't ever push our services through social media, we offer a lot of advice but we never give an overt sales message," she says.

"We can use tracking of social media sites, forums and blogs to get a really good idea of what people are discussing and where pests are becoming a problem - there's a really big problem with bed bugs at the moment, particularly in New York.

"One of our really popular pieces of social media work has been Ukwaspwatch.co.uk, where people can add locations of nests so we, and users, can build up a picture of where infestations are at their worst. Although we're not pushing our service it actually led to a 146% rise in enquiries to deal with nuisance nests."

The conversations that social media marketing can lead to, then, are not just about improving brand engagement. If done correctly, those most active in social media are reporting an impact on the bottom line as web users, understandably wary of their personal wall or Twitter feed becoming too commercial, identify a leading voice in a field and seek out its products.

Dell already claims to have sold more than $6.5m (#4m) worth of computers through Twitter in the past two years. Considering this social media channel has also ensured its latest ranges took on board customer feedback, there appears to be a virtuous circle developing, of which other brands should take note.

Copyright: Centaur Communications Ltd. and licensors