viZual Listening
Exploring the hidden stories of what consumers are discussing online
This Q&A was conducted by Abigail Rendin and Karen McShane of Olson Zaltman.
Professor Michael Mulvey, Professor of Marketing at the University of Ottawa, has partnered with Olson Zaltman in creating and developing viZual Listening, a methodology that leverages the power of ZMET to listen and “see” customer conversations online.
With viZual Listening we analyze metaphorical language, memes and other images to better understand the unconscious emotional meaning of the conversations people are having online. These insights can be used to power clients’ next campaign, pull out pain points, understand trending conversations that your brand should be a part of, and provide tactics to improve a brand’s own social media posts.
In the Q&A below, we speak with Dr. Mulvey about the development and application of this new methodology.
Let’s start at the beginning of your relationship with Olson Zaltman. How did it start?
Jerry Olson was my academic advisor when I was a PhD student at Penn State. At that time, he was in the process of founding Olson Zaltman. It was impossible to go into his office and not have a conversation about metaphor and how wonderful it was. And by no small coincidence, metaphors were a central part of my doctoral dissertation, which was on the meanings of money. We were looking at not only the words that people use to describe money, but also the pictures, the sounds, all the catchphrases, and beyond. That set the stage for an interest that went well beyond that.
And why use metaphor and imagery for social listening?
Metaphor and imagery are a way for people to express themselves. It is what ZMET was founded on. So when people post visual or metaphorical content online, it gives us access to their deep, unconscious frames, giving us a window into the mind of the consumer. Imagery and metaphor have always been very, very important. I think that why it’s really essential that we pay attention to images, conversations and metaphors in social media, the type that people share every day when they’re making their posts on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Reddit or when they are sharing a meme because it presents a tremendous opportunity to see into the subconscious of the mass market and really understand what they are thinking.
Tell me a little bit why viZual listening is different from what clients might think of when they think of social listening?
It’s a much more qualitative, holistic approach. What you are getting with viZual Listening is not your standard statistics and dashboards. Instead, you’ll get a deeper understanding of emerging trends. I like to think of our projects and the way we work as going to an extraordinary art museum where there’s a curator. The curator has taken the time and has the training to review the collection of images and metaphors, and see the patterns and the chronologies and the histories and the creators that tell a bigger story. And you can only get that when you have the right researcher curating the collection. And so it really is helpful that at Olson Zaltman we have backgrounds in areas like cultural anthropology, sociology, social psychology, history, mythology and archetypes, because we’re able to spot things in the data that others just haven’t developed the talent for yet. We’re able to see the patterns in the chaos.
The problem with a lot of the big data approaches is that they overwhelm you with data, but they don’t really discern the rich patterns that are there. And so we’re there to sort through that chaos, tell a story with coherence, that expresses what needs to be told.
The important thing is that social media is where we share ideas and our experiences. At Olson Zaltman we pay attention to the people, often in terms of the subreddits or the sub-communities they’re embedded with. A subreddit focused on the quality of goods built for life is very different from somebody who will share a post on why their celebrity is awesome. It will be a different picture and a different motivational rationale for that. And so we like to look at the creator’s embeddedness within the communities they participate in.
Speaking of Reddit, why is Reddit a primary source for viZual Listening?
Reddit has a reputation for being a haven for specialists and people who are passionate, the aficionados of the world. Those are really important people to study. And they’re not just going to talk in one or two lines, they’ll talk in three, four or five paragraphs. Sometimes they’ll give you one picture, or they’ll give you a curated collection of 20 pictures.
For example, if you think of a person who has a muscle car and is passionate about restoration, they will be a treasure trove. They will be like a historian or an archivist who will say, “Hey, that’s from a 1966, not a ’67. And you can tell by this, this and this.” They’ll take a collection of pictures and show you the nuances of the emblems or the different grille designs on those cars. So you’re going to get a lot of insight from those experts in the field.
Also, Reddit brings together people who are curious and those who are clueless and want to get clued in. And so some of the big, big subreddits with tens of millions of people are things like r/AskReddit, or r/AmItheAsshole. People want to figure out, “Am I doing the right thing?” “Do I have the right social norms?” “Am I clueless or not?” or “Where do I go to find this information?” For the most part, it’s highly constructive, highly cooperative, and really effective at guiding people to the places they need to go to solve their problems. So we need to look at those conversations to understand how products and brands are being understood.
I use the river metaphor. We often pay attention to the great rivers of the world — the Amazon, the St. Lawrence, the Mighty Mississippi and the Nile. But you have to understand that these rivers don’t come from nowhere. These rivers are akin to the mass market. So you need to go upstream by looking at social media sites like Reddit to find the creeks, tributaries and lakes. We need to understand these tributaries because these conversations are interconnected. In social media conversations we have to understand: What are the topics that make this community animated? What are their hot buttons? What do they love to hear? And what are they likely to contribute? Which posts engage them? Where did they not only like or up-vote, but where did they post their pictures? Where do they comment? Where do they ask questions?
So we like to look upstream and look at the origin stories. We look at the vitality of life experience, and how it unfolds over time and how it changes direction, just like the Mississippi, It’s got the main channel there, but we want to spot the trends, we want to figure out where it’s headed, we want to look where the sediment is deposited, because those are going to be rich, rich waters. And that’s where the shrimp is probably going to spawn. We want to read the waters of the consumer market.
It’s informative to look at what was in years past. But, really, what we’re trying to spot is where the next area is going to bloom, where the next trend is going to be. And we want to place our poker chips on good bets. And so we are trend spotters at the core of that, which is very cool.
What are some of the best ways for clients to use viZual Listening?
One of the things you can do is start checking off some of the everyday things that are on a brand manager’s list. One thing is, where does our brand fit? Where is our brand mentioned in the conversation? What are the pain points in the user experience of the brand? What are culturally relevant topics that the brand can tap into? What trending topics can the brand take part in? And even how can the brand’s social media better engage consumers?
Tell me more about that. Do you have an interesting use case of how viZual Listening works?
An example of something that’s been in the media lately has been the Stanley water bottle craze. All of a sudden, Stanley created this cup and it went viral. There’s nothing new here. There are all kinds of cups and containers that hold water that are durable, but this one started to go crazy. Well, you want to look at where people are talking about Stanley cups. You also want to see whether, if they’re mentioning Stanley cups, are they mentioning competitors? Are they talking about Hydro Flask? Are they talking about Yeti? You could do some simple benchmarking there. That’s a very common priority.
I think this points to one of the really rich things we can do with our version of social listening that’s not the same as the listening that people are used to: I’m very interested in what conversational domains are being talked about. So when people say Stanley cup, what subreddit is talking about it. And what we found is hundreds of subreddits where people were talking about the Stanley cup. Generally, people are really interested in what’s cool, what’s hip so we see lots of conversation around that. But also we see gearheads talking about it: “What is the best bottle? Is it worth it? What’s the most durable?” We also see people who watch reality television, we see people who follow influencers online talking about, “What’s he using? What’s she using?” Consumers look at them as heroes, but they also tear them apart and vilify them, depending on whether they like these characters or not. “Are they a shill that’s being paid to do this? Is that a legitimate source of information? Do you trust this person?”
But the part I love most about this is the possibility of surprise. This is about exploration and discovery. This type of research is for people who want to find the new world. One of the most interesting things we saw with this research was over 1.8 million people in a r/ADHD subreddit talking about the Stanley cup. It’s a subreddit where people commune around the idea of having attention deficit disorder. They help each other out. They know each other. They get each other. They talk about their lives, and they talk about solutions.
The Stanley cup came up in this subreddit. They love the product. It doesn’t tip over. They go off the rails when things make a mess or spill so they love that it fits in their car cup holder. They like that the lid seals itself and you can’t leave it open. They love the fact that it has a straw that flips up. And they love the fact that it’s made of silicone because it has a tactile quality, which gives them pleasure. And so they’re very attuned to their senses. Even something as mundane as drinking water. “It’s not water. It’s special now. It’s a water bottle you fill once and you’re good for the whole day that if you knock it over, you won’t go nuts. And that silicone just feels good. And you can call me weird, but I love it.”
So there’s a legitimacy to their consumption experience. And we can learn something about that product that adds value in ways that maybe we haven’t thought through or that their competitors haven’t thought through. Maybe we can learn more by listening to this community. There’s great opportunity for innovation whenever we cross boundaries between communities and see the links between what communities are talking about.
viZual Listening has been an amazing adventure because every study, you follow a path that hasn’t been charted, that’s when there’s the opportunity for discovery and potentially great rewards.
