Learning Points: To Get More Out of Social Media, Think Like an Anthropologist

1. Social Media was made for people, not for brands/companies.
2. Social Media should be listened to, not just managed.
3. Don’t look at data simply to confirm a pre-defined viewpoint
4. Technicalities of social data is simply information management versus
5. Anthropologists /culturally sensitive analysts who think like them specialize in meaning management.
6. Social listening, is useful for theory development, which does not require representative samples, the way quantitative research does.
7. Quantitative: hypothesis-testing mindset/statistical relationships between known concepts versus
8. Social Listening which helps to find the unknown-unknown.

Case Study:
A large pharmaceutical company, for example, learned about an unsuspected customer challenge through a single photo on Flickr. The image showed a man wrapping a part of his leg in foil after applying a pain relief ointment. It turned out that the medication left untreatable stains on certain fabrics, hence the protective foil. Executives had been unaware of the problem despite years of conventional consumer research. This single picture led to changes in the product and communications, and increased customer satisfaction.

Source: HBR