This book is designed to provide a roadmap for senior members of organizations. It describes what to look for and what questions to ask as they seek to understand and engage online consumers. Consumers are an organization's greatest assets and ones to be carefully managed. Increasingly, these consumers are found online. To engage online consumers, we need to understand them; thus this book on online consumer insight.
This book will focus on ways in which marketers may learn more about consumers as a foundation for effectively engaging them. The book will guide the reader through a discussion of consumer insight, online data gathering techniques, and Netnographic techniques. There will be directions as to the various ways to engage consumers online, whether those methods be as individuals or if they are as a part of monitored, virtual consumption communities. In addition to the information provided above, case studies of both online listening and engagement firms/platforms (e.g., Radian6, Communispace, Zuberance) as well as marketers/clients will be presented. These case studies will be sprinkled throughout the book with at least one per each section: defining online consumers, listening to online consumers, analyzing online consumers, engaging online consumers, and liberating online consumers.
Additional subjects will be addressed in the context of the above topics. First, the details of various types of textual analysis software (e.g., Nvivo, atlas.ti) will be discussed. Second, a detailed discussion regarding the differences between and strategies surrounding content analysis versus discourse analysis will be covered. Last, the actual process of deriving insights from the collected data will be presented including from the creation of data codes through the abstraction of those codes into themes. There will be two appendixes. One will give the reader a fundamental understanding (comparison) of the various Online Listening/Engagement Platforms. The second will provide an online consumer insight checklist, providing requirements and processes to monitor and engage consumers online
