Micro-Moments: Understand Digital Consumers from Their Live Tweets, Instagram Photos and Google Searches
By Wang Wenbo, Assistant Professor, Department of Marketing, HKUST Business School
[Sponsored Article]
Digital consumers are living their lives in micro-moments: purchase moments, discovery moments, action moments, et cetera. In those moments, consumers want to know, say, go, or buy, and they expect brands to address their immediate needs with real-time relevance. Thanks to mobile, micro-moments can happen anytime, anywhere. More importantly, micro-moments can be measured and managed.
I-Want-To-Know Moment
Consumer expectations for “right here, right now” experiences have been accelerated by mobile search technology. According to Google, search interest in “open now” has tripled in the past two years. At the same time, searches for “store hours” have dropped [1]. Mobile searches for “best” have grown 80 per cent in the past two years. Because they can, people are turning to their phones to guide them to make the right decision, big or small — on just about anything.
People also take it for granted that information from a smart phone has to be smartly tailored for them. The past two years have seen an interesting drop in location qualifiers like zip codes, neighborhoods and “near me” phrasing in local searches, because people know the results will automatically be relevant to their location [1]. This may intensify the competition among firms for the already limited attention of consumers. Perhaps it will be more and more likely that a few winners take all — only those with the right geographic or timing relevance to consumers will win out.
I-Want-To-Share Moment
Posting photos online has become a daily routine for many digital consumers. It is no surprise to see a friend’s Facebook or Instagram photos that capture live moments at a dinner. Indeed, images are on the way to surpassing text as the medium of choice for social conversations. In these photos, consumers often tag brands. What can firms learn from these photos?
A research team from New York University and the University of Washington [2] has shown how brands are portrayed on Instagram by mining the visual content posted by consumers. They first used machine learning to measure brand attributes (glamorous, rugged, healthy, fun) from images. They then applied classifiers to brand-related images posted on social media to measure what consumers are visually communicating about brands.
The study covered 56 brands in the apparel and beverage categories, comparing their portrayal in consumer-created images with images on the firm’s official Instagram account. They found that photos posted on social media contain rich information about brand positioning in the mind of consumers (see Figure 1). Firms should actively examine brand-related photos posted by consumers to monitor the sentimental trend of brands.
I-Want-To-Say Moment
YouTube comments, Twitter messages, and Facebook timelines are, in text data format, the collective representation of I-want-to-say moments. Industries, young or traditional, have all realized the importance of understanding these moments: who say what at where & when, and the reason behind. Tracking consumer sentiments from mining online text data now become a big part of the marketing research industry. Amazon and Alibaba have been closely monitoring consumer reviews at their e-commerce platforms. Facebook and Tencent do the same for their social network products. Insights based on such text data are used to improve targeting and consumer profiling for advertisers and beyond.
Video streaming platforms are now more ambitious than before on catching the I-want-to-say moment. The new feature in YouTube called “Live Chat” allows viewers to post comments while watching live sports, concerts, games and political events (see Figure 2). These comments are “live” too, in the sense that they can be posted any moment, shown immediately on the right side of the screen, and seen by others watching the same live stream — just like offline chats.
Youku, the leading video streaming platform in China owned by Alibaba, has an even more powerful version of the live chat function, known as “dan-mu”. Viewers can post their own comments and also “thumbs-up” others’ comments, for all type of video streaming, not only live shows. Imagine this: you are watching a football game online, but not alone, with thousands or millions fans as if they are chatting with you about the show — what they feel and (dis)like moment-to-moment— just like live offline!
My research [3] has found that people actively comment while watching online videos. It is quite common to see a 40-minute episode of a TV show with two to three million live comments on Youku. Viewers share their feelings and opinions particularly around some peak moments in a video stream. For example, around the peak moment of the Hollywood movie Hunger Game II when Katniss and Peeta kissed and cuddled, the volume of live comments on the screen also more than tripled compared to average.
Reading into these live comments can be highly managerial relevant. First, the volume and sentiment of live comments can predict viewers’ preference for a video. If the volume of live comments co-move with the contents of a video, the video is more likely to have high consumer ratings and receive more in-app purchases. This is because a good video is likely to immerse viewers and they are likely to follow the “rhythm” of the video. Hence their live comments synchronize with the contents of the video. Second, contents of live chats simply show viewers’ moment-to-moment feeling about video streaming. This can help video production especially for entertainment programs such as reality shows. For example, based on insights from live comments on a current episode, producers can edit or highlight some contents for the next episode to yield a better entertainment. Finally, knowing moment-to-moment consumer viewing experience can improve the timing of commercial break within a video stream. When viewers are highly engaged by the video, an advertising break can easily upset them.
Micro-Moment Marketing
It is important to realize that your brand is often not the center of your consumer's world. The key to micro-moment marketing is to embrace the idea that you have only a few seconds to seize the attention of consumers. In those nanoseconds, the challenge for brands is to convey a concise message that is relevant and of interest to the consumer. The trend towards micro-moments highlights the importance of mobile content delivery and the need for optimized and speedy solutions.
[1] Google Data Jan - June 2017 vs. Jan - June 2015. U.S.
[2] Liu Liu, Daria Dzyabura, and Natalie Mizik (2017), “Visual Listening In: Extracting Brand Image Portrayed on Social Media", working paper.
[3] Qiang Zhang, Wenbo Wang, and Yuxin Chen (2017), “In-Consumption Social Listening with Unstructured Data: The Case of Live Comments and Movie Appreciation”, working paper.
