New social networks could be good research tools for SMEs

A new group of social media tools are hitting the market designed to track and monitor the everyday actions of users such as credit card payments and restaurant experiences.

The emergence of these services has led some social media experts to believe marketers and businesses could begin to monitor these sites as another type of consumer-based research.

One of the major new services to be released is credit-monitoring service Blippy. The site tracks each purchase made with a credit or debit card, which is then shared among a user’s social network of friends.

The service is backed by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and founded by Silicon Valley veteran Philip Kaplan. It has managed to gain 13,000 users in just one month.

A new service named FourSquare has a similar premise. Users write reviews and comments about locations in their local city, which can then be viewed by a network of friends when they visit those locations.

More recently, “Strings” was launched yesterday, which attempts to aggregate a user’s social media usage, tracking movements on YouTube, purchases on sites such as Amazon, listening habits on iTunes and even reviews on the FourSquare site.

Con Frantzeskos, digital strategist at DDB, says there is a possibility the rich information on these sites could be harvested by marketers.

“Potentially this could happen, absolutely. However, where it is being used quite well is that businesses use sites like FourSquare to give incentives and that sort of thing. You reward those people who are being advocates for your business, and then once again, they will begin to talk about it and bring more people in.”

The FourSquare site has achievements and “badges” users can earn. Frantzeskos says businesses would do well to offer rewards to users who earn these achievements in order to bring in new business.

“If I’m going to buy something there is a very good chance I’m going to talk about it with my friends and share that. These tools just automate that procedure, and augments existing human behaviour. If you give them something as a business, they will talk about it.”

Frantzeskos says these new sites are not knock-offs of the mainstream services like Facebook or Twitter, but rather separate social networks of their own. He says their success lies in the fact they are making discussion and sharing of regular topics much easier.

“So many digital tools force people to change their behaviour, whereas FourSquare or Blippy make it easier for people to share what they have been doing.”

“If I go to a restaurant, and I’ve ordered a nice steak, I can put that on FourSquare and then when my friend goes in there, he can login, see what has been said about it and order the steak. It’s no different to what you might have already been doing, but it’s just easier to share that information… and that is powerful, for consumers and marketers.”

Sitepoint.com technical director Kevin Yank says these networks could become fodder for market researchers.

“The more open these things are, the easier they are used by market researchers and businesses because you can just see everything. Now with something like Facebook people are used to keeping information private, but it has also encouraged users to open information to the general public. They could do the same here.”

But Yank also says there are key differences between Facebook, Twitter and these new services, and businesses need to understand what they are dealing with before they start looking for information on a particular customer base on these sites.

“These services like FourSquare have individual characteristics, because these services are extremely public and don’t necessarily have a lot of privatisation features.”

“The challenge here for marketers is understanding the unique aspect of each service, and then judging and using the information they gain within that context. If you were to judge a user based on public information from Facebook, it wouldn’t necessarily work, but FourSquare and Blippy are out in the open.”