Social media tool tracks brand reputation live
A team of researchers has developed a method that allows companies to track their brand reputation in real time over the long term—by analyzing social media comments. As the study published in the *Journal of Marketing* shows, a proof-of-concept demonstration using Twitter made it possible to accurately assess the reputation of 100 major brands.
A traditional assessment of brand reputation requires sifting through mountains of corporate data or regular surveys of thousands of consumers. That's usually left to large companies - and could be eliminated in the future thanks to social media. "We developed the so-called 'Brand Reputation Tracker', which analyzes social media text on Twitter and, with the help of eleven different measures, gives us an in-depth understanding of what users think of individual brands," explains Bill Rand, a marketing professor at North Carolina State University and one of the study's lead authors.
The Brand Reputation Tracker is based on the Rust-Zeithaml-Lemon model. It measures factors such as "coolness," "social responsibility" and "trustworthiness" and combines them into three values. The so-called value driver shows how well stakeholders find the value of a brand, the so-called relationship driver how strongly they identify with the brand. Finally, the brand driver maps things like style and popularity. "The text evaluation provides a numerical value for each factor and the three values," Rand said. Because social media is fast-moving, changes in the values also map very short-term trends.
Very broadly applicable concept
To show how and that this works, the researchers looked at 100 well-known brands. That revealed, for example, that for publicly traded brands, changes in value, relationship and brand drivers are reflected in share price. "A possible next step is to significantly expand the data set of brands we looked at to get a more comprehensive understanding of the brand landscape," Rand says.
The approach could also be used to compare brands in a specific sector. It would also be conceivable to modify the tool to look at specific aspects of brands, such as whether they are considered "green" or "sustainable." In any case, however, the approach is much more accessible to SMEs than previous methods for assessing brand reputation, Rand said. That's because, in principle, all that needs to be done is to develop a suitable tool that then extracts actionable information from public data on Twitter. (pte)
