Because of the complexity and scale of online activity, ICM has developed a digital research continuum to drive insight from passive listening through to active engagement.
We’re in a world of big data, and the challenge is finding the things that matter most among 1.2 Zetabytes of data across 200 million blogs, 350 million daily Tweets and countless other expressions of customers’ interests and desires. ICM’s digital listening and questioning tools are designed to help businesses better understand the ever-changing and increasingly complex brand relationships in which they exist, through giving clarity on how consumers and organisations use social media to converse, post information and alter the way people think about them.
Digital listening is made up of social media listening and online journey tracking.
Social media listening is different from social media monitoring because we turn conversations and mentions of your brand or product into a true sense of what matters to people and what it means for your brand. Because we are researching humans, not machines, we use human coding for this to ensure quality in a complex world, and accuracy to give actionable results.
For online journey tracking, we have an opted-into panel of people who allow us to monitor what websites they are travelling through. We collect data in an on-going manner and can conduct various forms of research, including journey path analysis, competitor analysis, SEO analysis and the greater effect of search engines and price comparison sites.
Digital questioning takes these approaches further and adds the ‘why’ to the ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘when’. ICM conducts social media ROI analysis, studies to ascertain the effect and value of a Facebook Like or digital campaign, and also has the ability to dynamically sample based on viewing history or even recruit people who visit a certain website, as and when they arrive at the page.
Involvement and engagement are new approaches to market research that tap into participants’ own interests, working with them in a more open and transparent way, research through relationships.
This approach allows us to learn from and interact with customers or specialists, to help find insights that aren’t readily apparent with other research techniques, key to this is understanding their relationships in the context of their own lives – seeing the participant at the centre of their web of influences to understand the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of their decisions and feelings.
To achieve this ICM’s Digital Research team combines tried and tested involvement and engagement techniques with research of the quality and rigour you’d expect from a company like us. We mix conversations between members with surveys and cutting edge online qualitative techniques to give our clients a new perspective on the things they need to know.
Led by Dr. Tom Wormald we have a team of developers and community managers who create client-branded social media research sites, from collectives up to brand cultures.
To find out more please email us or call 020 7845 8300 or contact digital@icmresearch.com
