Just as in the wonderful Dr. Seuss book “Horton Hears a Who!”, the world of social media may have started off perceived as a tiny speck of dust, whose participants only elephants with tremendous listening capabilities could hear. Turns out that the speck is actually a world of its own and is a growing source of constant opinions about products and brands. “Listening” has gone well beyond the elephantine companies on the cutting edge of market research to be a mainstream source of next generation real-time market intelligence.

So what’s next?

Traditional marketers and research professionals now want to extend their knowledge beyond a basic understanding of what is being said by taking a holistic approach that includes analysis of who is speaking and what are the deeper implications for product or brand based on online conversations?

“Social Media as a Cocktail Party” has made the Amazon best-seller list, in part by claiming that “Social media is, unbeknownst to many of its users, the largest, best, most accurate market segmentation tool ever invented. This is true for groups that have self-organized online (we at CI call these categories “psychographics” due to the tendency within social media participants to organize around hobbies (“chess clubs”) and attitudes and values (“the environment”) as opposed to demographics).

However, for groups that do not self-organize online, how do companies begin to understand the basic demographic characteristics – such as age and gender – of individuals interested enough in their products to speak about them online? The amount of public information available about bloggers continues to increase and that, in turn, supports online segmentation efforts. Social media research is not simply limited to what people are saying but what individuals who are discussing your product or brand “look like” demographically. Technological advances in terms of harvesting relevant online content have given rise to what we call “intersection analytics”, which support a deeper look at where brands intersect with social media. “Intersection analytics” simply means that we can locate the prominent attributes (e.g., taste, value, quality) associated with any brand or product based on online conversations. Think of “intersection analytics” as the instantaneous, ongoing relationship between attributes such as “tastes great” or “expensive” or “too sweet” and where and to what degree they can be applied to (“intersect with”) your brand. The brand, of course, can then be compared to competitive brands in the space along the same dimensions to determine brand positioning, all without spending a dime on a focus group.

A recent post on the social media activity associated with the Oscars highlights the ability to augment “traditional” social media research with demographics. For companies with this technology, the future is rapidly becoming the current. We now know that it was a little boy, and one who shirked his duties previously, named Jo-Jo who helped save Who-Ville with an incredible “YOPP!” at just the right time.