Social media in product development
Logan Sandor, Justis Midura, Sabreena Abedin, George Ingber, Maxwell Pederson, Tim Sander, Liam Wolf, Reid Bailey, Abigail A. Flower · 2018
Social media offers a unique and wide-reaching view into consumers' thoughts, opinions, recommendations, and personal experiences. This kind of information can be valuable in the product development process. The focus of this project is to examine if and how unprompted social media data can inform new product development using a case study with a Fortune 100 consumer products company. In the case study, a text analytics tool was created to allow discovery and exploration of potential new trends in skincare ingredients and application methods using data obtained from Reddit, Facebook, and skincare blogs. The tool identifies and monitors trends over time for popularity and impact to inform decision making in new product development. Based on the case study, important factors in using social media to identify trends include 1) finding social media sites with relevant content to meet the goals of the project, 2) using term lists to target specific areas of interest, and 3) considering time with respect to frequency of postings, setting time periods of trend measurement, and ensuring the data includes timestamps. Setting the time period over which trends are assessed involves a trade-off between the ability to identify early trends (shorter time periods are better) and sufficient data (longer time periods are better). In the case study, sites where people come for help from a community (e.g., Reddit) and DIY/maker blogs proved to be good sources of emerging trends. The use of term lists proved key in targeting analyses on ingredients and application methods in the case.