Thursday, December 11, 2008

Language Skills

What else can we learn from social media?

How your company and brand are portrayed is an obvious use of social media. Another application is understanding a new market. If your targeting either a new audience or entering a new category, understanding the language is key.

Working with a client on understanding a new category segment we found the following:
1. The sophistication of the language is very different, even when talking about the same thing.
2. Language and terminology can be perceived as either a barrier to entry or a protective shield around a club of those in the know.
3. There appears to be a trickle down effect of language -certain sources often create phrases or 'sound bytes' that work there way into the vernacular. (It would be interesting to trend the adoption of these over time - like a diffusion model.)
4. The hard part is identifying the appropriate terminology. Since social media monitoring typically works with a list of key words it becomes an iterative approach to find the next set of words.

Linguistic and semantic skills are required to leverage social media this way.

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