How Online Discussions Help With Product Marketing: Telecom Case Study
Becoming aware of online comments and learning how to use the information can avert potential downturns in sales and can help companies fine-tune their marketing. In a recent article at the Kellogg business school site, a cell phone case study is used to make a point about the value of social conversations for business.
The researchers examined online word-of-mouth for the cellular phone industry. They focused on five specific brand models from five leading cell phone companies in the United States. Using data from an online forum with more than eight million posts, they explored the conversations of individual posters over time and analyzed how the nature of these posts related to individual customer behavior. From there they examined how the nature of online conversations relates to corporate performance.
In a working paper based on their research, Krishnamurthi and his colleagues report that they developed the data set by identifying keywords in the posts that expressed an attitude toward a cell phone and usage experience. He explains, “We classified people’s comments in these posts in three ways. One is an action-type statement, such as ‘I’m going to buy it.’ Another type expresses emotion, such as ‘I hate it.’ The third category is made up of attribute-type statements that have to do with quality, things that relate to the functionality of the product, such as ‘It has great reception.’” Each type of rating can be positive or negative.
Using specially designed software, the researchers rated the action, emotion, and attribute statements on a scale. According to Krishnamurthi, “It’s a little bit like artificial intelligence. You take a large number of posters and look at all the words they use, and create a classification of these words as highly negative through highly positive. The software has a dictionary, and when these posts are made the software automatically classifies them on this continuum.”
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