e-Rewards acquires Conversition: A Marriage of Social Media and Market Research

Image via CrunchBase

Last week, e-Rewards bought social media market research agency Conversition. Conversition utilizes scientific principles to the collection and analysis of social media data. Its solutions include TweetFeel, MatterMeter and EvoListen. Its product EvoListen, which is at present under development, gathers data from online social media outlets; cleans, filters and weighs it, and then transforms the information into quantitative data sets. This will enable e-Rewards’ clientele to listen and analyze what clients are saying on social media.

According to e-Rewards president and CEO, Chris Havemann, with more than half a billion consumers worldwide participating in social media platforms currently, “social media listening will go on to become an increasingly more essential method for corporations to accumulate useful insights about the needs and demands of their clients.” E-Rewards’ acquisition of Conversition, together with Research Now in 2009 and Peanut Labs in 2010, signals the strengthening of the growing relevance of social media in market research:

• Social media is a steadily essential component of modern day market research mainly because it is an critical source of buyer data. According to Forrester’s Technographics data, over 80% of online US customers regularly use some form of social media and such high numbers aren’t just limited to developed markets. Emerging markets such as Brazil and China are also avid users of social media. A acquired online panel supplier will normally supply you with a 6 to 8 million actively engaged panel, but with a social media panel, you can have access to over 600 million active users. This is what makes social media an important channel for market research and a viable marketing strategy.

• Listening to your customers hasn’t been less complicated as it is with social media. customer conversations and feelings about your product or service, their interactions with peers, their suggestions and “likes” – can all help you create intriguing and holistic profiles of your customer segments. You can evaluate their conversations to better comprehend your product positioning relative to competitors, track your product and campaign overall performance, and create new ideas and hypotheses that you can test through further research. E-Rewards’ acquisition of Conversition Strategies further confirms the value of “listening” to customers in market research.

• Concerns about the representativeness of social media research and how to quantify it are being resolved by technologies like EvoListen, which make the unstructured nature of social media fit into the organized world of market research. This helps bridge the gap among market insights and social research. E-Rewards handles this by supplying a solution that provides some background around social media conversations to market insights professionals, which in turn helps them develop a framework for their research. Moreover, it converts all listening data into conditions that market researchers can relate to.

Faria Rahman assists our Open View portfolio with research initiatives.

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