Social Media Watchers

I was reminded on the danger of over-analytics when I visited a forum myself recently.

My favourite camera manufacturer is going to focus, punnily enough, on smaller cameras and put a hold on new R&D in their older, larger lens system. This has resulted in a hole shit storm of over reaction in forums. They are just shifting focus according to their management.

For consumer electronics, forums are still the place to gain detailed insight into consumer opinion. Facebook is often left wanting for involvement with the groups, as they just never seem to get a critical mass for even large consumer gadget pages. Twitter and the other web SMSs can help with gaining a barometer view of consumer opinion and help firefight crisises. Perhaps the annonymity of forums (most use a handel with a similarily obscure hot- or G-mail address apparently) leads consumers to speak more candidly.

With the former, the one forum, dpreview, has over 29 million posts, but once you get granular on brands or sub forums, and look at recent posts, then you realise that analytic tools can be misleading. Looking at fluxes in consumer hits on brand keywords can be somewhat misleading, when there is a strong undercurrent of discontent or potential for NPI ears to listen.

It is in other words, often better to identify the key forums and just have a junior marketeer keep an eye for trouble and summarise threads rather than go employ a company to show you some key word hit counts and what happened long before you needed to know it happened!

With Twitter too, so far the tools are pretty useless and manual labour to identify keywords, tweet structire, retweet rate and then sentiment are so far a better bet. Very soon though there will be good sentiment analytics, but they will need continual manual tweaking to catch sentiment in the abbreviated tweetspeak world.

The value of analytics has to be balanced with the value of just reading the stuff and tracking the lead influencers manually, especially in "issue management" as fire-fighting is often called in the ePR world now. Over time, brand tracking and sentiment rating is of value, but must be seen in context of the development of the media itself and always related in relative terms to competing brands and some other benchmark brand arena.

Hard Work! Repeat ! Work Hard"

Now I note that it is time for a new intake of masters students to the 2011 MSc Marketing course.

Firstly congratulations on landing a place on a course which will give you a head start in your career in marketing or business otherwise, in providing you with knowledge, skills and not the least attitudes to suceed.

In terms of your career, marketing is not for the faint hearted. It requires a lot of percieverance just to get a career started, even to get interviews or work experience to get half way up to the first rung on the ladder. You have to be very tough or very lucky to get on and in my experience all too many Msc graduates have vaguely wandered into marketing because it sounds interesting, without knowing that it is very, very hard to get into once you finish.

The freddy blog seems to have been read a lot by previous graduates and I will stress again upon the new students, that marketing is a very, very, propostorously competitive profession to get into and then progress within. Please read back over my previous blogs on job hunting and how to get on: your job hunt preparation begins now and will start in earnest in October if you want to make the best possible head way against the larger brand companies.


Marketing is so extremely tough to get into because so many people want to work in it, not just qualified marketeers. Many of those general business graduates want in, many sales people want to move in(degree or no degree) and then you also have all and sundry BA, BSc, for example many psychology graduates, wanting a piece of the action. Then of course, there is the whole oxbridge bunch of medieval historians or theoretical economics who seem to be able to slide into plumb jobs. They have a head start because so many previous brand managers came from the UK's own "ivy league" and follow the "model for success" by recruting back from Oxbridge, Durham and so on.

You will need your luck, but the harder you try in your studies, job hunt and network building, the luckier you will get.. My career languised until one day I took a call and it was the golden opportunity to get a real start. I seized it, although it was pretty mediocre pay, and worked darn hard to learn the practical aspects of marketing on the shop floor of a "through the line" ad agency. After two years, the world so to speak was actually my oyster because the big agencies had stopped training new graduates and prefered experienced people from even much smaller agencies. I moved on to a decent wage and company car and later had the option to move "client side" for fewer working hours.

Read back through my advice and take it as highly opinionated, personal stuff, but remember it is based on the realities of job hunting and building a career. I have worked for 15 years with internet marketing for example, so new technology does not take over from the human hum-drum of pressing flesh and getting yourself a job these days.