The Lego Group
For a few
insights of the Lego Group I can reveal that Lego is a Danish founded and
family owned company producing the best toy of the century. In fact Lego has most recently become the world’s most valuable toy brand
overtaken the leading position of mayor toy manufacturers such as Mattel (producing
Barbie), Haasbro and Playmobile.
Reflections of findings
Conclusion
References
blogs
wikis
YouTube
flicker
Facebook
Twitter
rebrick
HowSociable
Tweetreach
Topsy
“lego”is slang for “let’s go”
Smile and their newest hit: LEGO
next wave ofsocial media listening
Besides Lego being an awesome toy, the reason that I picked Lego is, however, also related to the fact that Lego worldwide has millions of both adult and younger fans that share their passion for the small coloured bricks through all sorts of social media such as blogs, wikis, YouTube, flicker, Facebook and Twitter not to mention all the individual fan sites.
In order for Lego to nurture the many fans Lego has also set up the rebrick fan site, not to brand their products, but to establish a common platform for fans to interact, share ideas, rate and comment on what’s going on in the “Lego community”
Social media monitoring of Lego
So with all this social
media activity around Lego why not have a look at how Lego performs using different
social media monitoring tools:
HowSociable: offers a simple tool to measure the Magnitude score on a scale from 0 – 10 (which is the activity of your brand on different major social media platforms) on a given week . I thought it would be fun to compare the results
of Lego with their largest competitor Mattel
Tweetreach: is another
monitoring tool that specifically analyse the activity on Twitter providing
gaphs, circular diagrams etc. and provides a list of the newest tweets
containing the brand name.
Topsy: takes it a bit further by also monitoring
links, photos and videos.
Reflections of findings
As I typed in Lego on
Tweetreach and went over the latest tweets I however discovered a bit of a bias
of the numbers: As some of the tweets were in foreign languages I found (thanks
to my good friend Google translate) that lego is actually a “word” in Spanish with
several different meanings i.e. “I bequeath” or “layman”. Also I found that “lego”is slang for “let’s go”.
Furthermore when I used
Topsy I also discovered that one of the latest posted videos was a rap music video
with by a band called Smile and their newest hit: LEGO. You don’t have to watch
more than 30 seconds to tell that this is again the famous slang and has
nothing to do with coloured plastic brick toys.
Returning to my analysis I furthermore
discovered that some tools were case sensitive which I guess can be problematic
do to the fact that users might write either: Lego, lego or LEGO again biasing
a valid result. These findings unfortunately also decrease the validity of my
mini battle of Lego vs. Mattel on HowSociable.
Conclusion
Ultimately the results of my
analysis proved not to be purely build on the Lego brand. I do, however, think
that the monitoring tools can provide some
indication of the activity around a specific brand. The uniqueness of the brand
name is, nevertheless, also very crucial in terms of gaining valid results. If
Lego were to get the most accurate measures of the social media activity I
would recommend the company to engage in social media intelligence instead of monitoring
- as I found this to be the next wave of social media listening.
References
wikis
YouTube
flicker
rebrick
HowSociable
Tweetreach
Topsy
“lego”is slang for “let’s go”
Smile and their newest hit: LEGO
next wave ofsocial media listening
Nice read! Thank you for sharing the experience of trying out social media monitoring tools for LEGO. It was indeed the favourite toy for my childhood :p
ReplyDeleteIn regards to the BIAS information result you have searched, I would say maybe try combine the word "LEGO" and "TOY" for search; furthermore,LEGO would be able to monitor and analyse their social media profiles easily utilising tools such as Buffer and HootSuite (the analysis tool for social media account owners only).
Come and visit my latest blog post in regards to my experience of trying out SocialMention for Siemens.
http://jiabaoli.blogspot.com.au/2013/09/social-media-monitoring-tools-way-to.html
Hi
DeleteThanks for the feedback! Yes maybe you could try different key words. But unfortunately you can’t be sure that users will use the word “toy” when they write about Lego on a social media platform. I.e. someone writes: “building a new house, Lego!” This can both mean that the author is building a real house and likes to get on with the work. It can also mean that the author is building a new Lego house and loves the brand. The social media monitoring tools would not be able to tell the difference – If you know what I mean :-)
Yeah, and I do agree that free social monitoring tools are not that reliable, users might have to think twice before they fully trust the figures provided by them. But hey, they are free and sometimes can be pretty useful when utilised appropriately.
ReplyDeleteYes I totally agree with you on that one :-)
DeleteHi Lise,
DeleteI found it interesting in the way that Jiabao and you raised up the discussion topic on the key words' consideration and the reliability of the free social monitoring tools. In relating to this, from experiencing some of my chosen tools, I found that some organisations have specific social media accounts as making them to be unique enough for the users/customers to easily find them on their available social channels as well as in the monitoring tools. This includes the organisational main branches and their sub-branches around the world. It also needs to be noted that the case of fake accounts required the users to recheck back at the organisations' official websites again for confirmation.
About your post, I think that you have selected some interesting social monitoring tools. The issues that you found during your discovery reminded me about the first stage of setting the username for the social media account. Although some words can be spelled or pronounced the same, but they might possibly referred to different contexts/subjects (http://bit.ly/KPqLRH).
Nice Lego's monitoring post, Lise :)
Hi Sarun
DeleteThanks for your comment. I guess not all organisations can benifit equally from the free tools given the uniqueness of the brand name :-/ I t is surely something to keep in mind before the companies trust the tools blindly :-)
Another good article, I used to be a LEGO fan as well when I was a child! :) In fact, I didn't know it was a Danish company who invented it (well, probably it was written on the box, I should have read that... :)).
ReplyDeleteI had a quick look at the article about social media monitoring vs intelligence linked in your last paragraph. Am I right in saying that while social media monitoring usually only means simple text based pattern matching, social media intelligence goes deeper and attempts to analyse the data in a deeper context, i.e. try to infer the real meaning of the data? For example, would social media intelligence be able to determine the correct context of the “building a new house, Lego!” example you mentioned in one of your replies?
Hi
DeleteI guess when you are a child you don’t care too much about where the products come from as long as they are fun :-) That is exactly also how I understood the difference between social monitoring and social intelligence Ha ha that is a really good question and honestly I doubt that. I am not sure exactly “how” the intelligence tool “listen” but if it is as effective as the article states I guess that it should be more exact than the original social media monitoring tools :-)
Thanks Lise for sharing this valuable information.
ReplyDeleteYes I totally agree with you in engaging Lego into social media intelligence.
What I also think they might do is, to combine social technology with Mobile technology and local data in which the company can add it to their marketing strategies and to design an interactive mobile application to increase interactions between customers.
And here is my latest blog post about monitoring social media for Woolworths, Hope you like it :)
http://maramalkhayyal.blogspot.com.au/2013/09/social-networking-strategies-monitoring.html
Hi Maram
DeleteI never thought of the mobil side of interaction so I did a quick research and found that Lego has heaps of different apps both for younger kids and the rest of the "young" souls, but you are totally right that Lego would be silly not to use the vital information gathered through these medias. So thanks for the input :-)
Hey there Lise, thats quite the breakdown of social media tools. It's very curious how a seemingly innocuous and one-use word in our cultures and countries can have entirely different meanings in another. The fact that the difference can influence the social media of a company in this way is both hilarious and worrying, since it hinders the discovery of useable data about social media use. Obviously lego has already thought this through and adapts to the situation, but that doesn't make it any better. Of course there are likely more specialised and specific tools that only take into consideration direct mention of the lego brand. Great article!
ReplyDeleteHi Sam!
DeleteYes, hopefully Lego has a few bit more advanced social media listening tools than the few free monitoring tools I used. Lego is also fortunate that there are SO many platforms entirely dedicated to the brand where Lego shouldn’t experience any misinterpretations of the word “lego” :-)
Hi Lise,
ReplyDeleteWow! I had fun reading your post. Mostly, because I love Lego, too! Oh yeah, many of us just cannot get enough of Legos. I’d agree that social media monitoring tools are not as accurate. Well, for one, it’s free. So, I am guessing, no one really is paying too much attention to ensure that it delivers accurate results. Another factor I am thinking is the level of activity that the Lego Company is involved in social media maybe affecting those results. I mean how active are they in promoting on social media and engaging social media users? Is there a way to find this out? Do you think this can be a good factor to look into? I wonder if social media intelligence can really provide an accurate analysis on search terms applied by users. What is your opinion on this matter?
Please feel free to visit my blog and leave a comment:
http://hussain69.wordpress.com/
Hi Hussain
DeleteThanks for stopping by! Think you have a good point about the tools being free and you thereby can’t expect too much from them. I am sure Lego has a nice overview of the activity in all the sites and platforms they control i.e. facebook, rebrick etc. In regard to your question of how much Lego engage in social media branding and interaction with their customers, my short answer is: A LOT!!! (that is at least my impression of my studies). In terms of the external activity on the independent fan sites I would only hope that Lego manage to keep an eye “out there” using a proper set of tools. I must confess that I do not know the answer to your final question as I am not sure how precise the social intelligence tools are compared to the social media monitoring tools. But I don’t think that even the best tools would always be able to analyse what the tweets or updates involving “lego” is really about.
Hi Lise, do you think social monitoring has much benefits then for Lego as a company? What can do do better to improve their social presence?
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteHi,
Personally Thank you for provide Great ! example.A
creative writing can change
freelancer carer.Creative writing also help get
more traffic.And good writing
can make good portfolio.You have added some
meaningful point that are fine.
Thanks.
free
social media tools