Interactive Insights Group

In last week’s post “The Ultimate Guide to Delicious Social Bookmarking” we provided a comprehensive guide to social bookmarking service Delicious.  In this guest post, IIG’s strategic partner Dr. Carla Sarett, President of the Internet Research Group, explores an innovative technique she developed to mine Delicious for consumer insights.

As a market researcher, I’ve conducted my share of focus groups and in-depth interviews.  As a result, I’ve learned what consumers had to say when I was guiding the conversation — with clients eagerly awaiting the next mention of their brand.  Sure, people talk about what I wanted them to talk about – but that’s what they were paid to do.

So, I’m always excited to find other ways to get into consumer’s heads. Through Robin, I’m hooked on social bookmarking – and Delicious in particular. And a number of great articles included in Robin’s Ultimate Guide to Delicious Social Bookmarking like Steve Rubel’s article 15 Things I Learned from Delicious, Jeremiah Owyang’s Using Delicious for Marketing Research and Ann Smarty’s How to Analyze your Site with Del.icio.us all pointed to how Delicious could be used for market research. Most importantly, Lisa Braziel’s  Introducing Delicious Tag Mining for Brand Research: provided a terrific example of how, with analytic imagination, Delicious could inform brand research.

Why Focus On Delicious?

With Delicious, you get to see how users categorize different chunks of content. And, users don’t have social pressures in Delicious: it’s not organized by clubs or affinity groups (like Facebook) even though users can share their content and comments. As a researcher, I can’t stress enough the value of individual choices! I decided to “mine” Delicious to see if I could find some broader trends. Since I love shopping, I wanted to generate a few fresh hypotheses about what consumers were thinking about shopping – especially in this economic downturn.

Using Delicious can be confusing and I had to do some trial and error. I first played around with the “explore tags” function, and found that both the “recent” and “popular” lists don’t work well for research-they are updated constantly and so, obviously, unstable. So, I ended up (at Robin’s suggestion) using Delicious search. This gave me a stable list of websites that was ranked by the frequency of tags of the search term (not just total bookmarks.)

Here’s My 6-Step Approach

• Step 1: Keyword Search: I started with one search term (shopping) through Delicious search- searching for Everybody’s bookmarks.

• Step 2: Share with Colleagues: I stored this search as a bookmark to share with other researchers. (To share it with Robin, I tagged it with “for:iig”)
• Step 3:  Determine # Tags for Top Ranked Sites: I then identified how many shopping tags there were for each of the top ranked sites from the default search ranking. By clicking on the total number of bookmarks for each site, I found all the tags and marked down the number of shopping tags.

• Step 4:  Establish Threshold and Narrow Down Sites: I then set a threshold for the number of shopping tags to include in my exercise. For my preliminary shopping exercise, which had a large number of bookmarks, I set a threshold of 5,000 user tags. This gave me 7 sites.
• Step 5: Determine Other Popular Tags for Each Top Site: Using this list, I noted the 10 most popular tags on these sites, apart from the search term (shopping). I could also do this by searching the URL on Delicious. Now, I had a list of tags and from these, I could begin to look for patterns [from either the repeat mentions or relationships between tags) and generate hypotheses.
• Step 6: Visit Each Site: Finally, since I'm an avid online shopper, the fun part. I visited each site to look at what products it was selling and what its features and content were. Especially if you're not familiar with your category, this is a must.

What Did I find?

Table 1 below shows what this first level of Delicious mining yields, with a list of tag terms used. The 7 sites are: Etsy, RetailMeNot, Amazon, Woot, ThinkGeek, Ebay, and Threadless. Eyeballing this list, I found some terms that I expected to see: deals, bargains, coupons, discount. In my mind, these were boring, since it's not news that online shopping has always invited bargain-hunters, and anyone like me who's an avid online shopper is happily aware of all the sales.

But, I was looking for some fresh ideas about shopping - something I couldn't get from metrics data or Google Search. And I was not disappointed. As Table 1 shows, my tag list also gave me some less expected terms: "handmade", "community" "art" - even "cool" and "fun" and "inspiration." Given all the bad news about super-thrifty shoppers, I was relieved to find that at least some folks are having fun, buying clothing, gifts, gadgets and toys.

So, here's my first level take on this tag list:

1. Shopping online, from this list of tags, looks like an entertaining and highly social experience.  Sure, times are bad, but shoppers are still out there enjoying themselves.  Even a bargain-oriented gadget site like Woot (which sells only one item per day until it is sold out) has its own blog, its own version of community, and contests.   And Thinkgeek offers "stuff for smart masses" - with such must-haves as a fish-training school, it's no surprise why Delicious users tagged that this site as "cool" "humor" and "fun."  I even found a techie Haiku section here.
2. There's a segment of alternative shoppers -- and what they want isn't made in China. Small businesses and crafts persons are producing unusual hand-crafted items that have a market for those seeking "inspiration", "design", and "art." Etsy is a crafts site that sells hand-crafted items (some, like handmade puppets, are pricey), and features a section where buyers can request customized item bids, like "tablecloths for my daughters wedding." Threadless offers hand-designed t-shirts with a community based on contests and ratings of t-shirts-and even videos of t-shirt designers. Definitely not made in China.  I wonder -as luxury takes a hit, if the "make it for me" segment is the next new opportunity.
3. While jobs may be hard to find, some Americans may be thinking about creating their own online business.  Three of the sites on our list are buyer-seller communities: Etsy "Your place to buy and sell all things handmade" has an active user community and Threadless, a hybrid site, and E-bay.  I'm guessing users are bookmarking these as they think about starting or expanding their own ventures in the crafts/handmade space.  At the same time E-bay looks it's becoming a straight business auction site - it's only tagged with community by a small number (93) users.  While this may not pull eBay traffic down, it may spell bad news for the merchant side.

Where to go next?

In exercises like this, it's up to the researcher (in this case, me) where to go next.  I personally was intrigued by the niche buyer seller communities.  So, I next searched (again, using Delicious search) for "community shopping" in order to explore this theme further. [Hint: check each site individually to make sure results are relevant.] Since this search yields a much smaller number of sites, I chose a lower threshold level for community tags (N=500).

Where did this take me?

I again spotted tags of ‘design”, “gifts” “fashion” – but, I now saw “environment” “green” and “sustainability” as well as “social, ” which is shared by two shopping blogs (thisnext.com and stylehive.com.) “Freecycle.org” is a site which is “a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement of people who are giving (& getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It’s all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills.” Reading the user notes on Delicious, I read it is part of a “global gifting movement” which might explain the brand-new t-shirts it sells in its store.   Checking the Etsy site, I found it too promotes a movement – a “handmade movement” – even a slogan suggesting that buying handmade is connected to changing the world. Global gifting movement?  Handmade movement?  From my earlier list, I’d hypothesize that alternative shoppers and communities might thrive during the downturn.

Now, some new thoughts:

1. The new entrepreneurs selling handmade, independently designed or recycled items perceive themselves as part of a social movement-and buyers may feel the same way. I know retailers have already begun to make donations to encourage shopping – but I now wonder if shopping, even without the promise of donating, will become itself a sort of cause. Perhaps, my next necklace purchase will support the handmade movement?   (Now, that’s a cause I can support.)
2. At the same time, American-style consumerism is alive and well.  I was thrilled to find social shopaholics in the other sites on the list. Both (tagged with “social” and “design”) depend on the idea that people like to “rave” about products.  Thisnext proclaims that “better buying leads to better living” and Stylehive, a social bookmarking site, is “an online style club for people who live for fashion, design and shopping.”  Seems like an enthusiastic mantra of consumerism.  But not exactly– I checked on the “maven” buyers on Thisnext, and found a recommendation for “100% Organic Bamboo towels” and another “maven” with a “green” list.

So, what can be gained by using Delicious for consumer insights?

Bottom line: for market researchers who are interested in new product development and “idea generation”, Delicious is a true gold mine. Like any other research technique, Delicious mining will need to be refined -and I’ll be working on enhancing what I’ve done here in the coming months.  I’m really looking forward to seeing what other researchers come up with as well. Have ideas, questions or thoughts about using Delicious to mine for consumer insights?  Feel free leave comments here.

June 10th, 2009

Tags:   Bookmarking · datamining · delicious · Market research2 Comments