What is Netnography and How It Can be Used for a Better Marketing Strategy?

Netnography can be described as a tool used by marketers, which aims to collect and process the data related to social behaviour of people on the Internet. There have been other research tools for data collection, such as surveys and focus groups to obtain the consumer insights, considering they might be misleading due to ostensible responds; netnography focuses on gathering data accurately and instantaneously while consumers are behaving freely (What is Netnography? | Martech Zone, 2021). To understand the difference of netnography from traditional methods, it is better to go through the history of the term.

The History of Netnography

The word netnography was invented by Dr. Robert V. Kozinets in 1995, depicting a connection between ethnographic research and free social behaviour of the individuals on the Internet. Accordingly, the name of netnography comes from the combination of ethnography and internet which is also as known as net in short. As ethnography is considered one of the qualitative research methods that requires the researcher to be present in the actual place of the study for data collection, its context depends on cultural or sociological insights. As well as ethnography, netnography holds similar perspective in terms of searching about people’s behaviour, which means both studies are descriptive, immersive, benefiting from different methodologies and may easily adapt to different contexts (How Market Research Is Like Anthropology, 2021).

How It works and Why It is Different from Other Methods?

To understand how netnography works is simple. It uses from the same methodology as ethnography does, but it also integrates online or social media data into cultural insights. According to Kozinets, in the light of netnography, online interactions are regarded as cultural reflections. 

Comparing with other methods, netnography looks more useful and realistic than surveys and focus groups as they might be intrusive, artificial or irrelevant to consumers, and cost more considering the number of research population. Netnography is “cultural insights” and “context” focused, which means it doesn’t interpret online interactions and communications as simple content and searches for meaningful conclusions from that cultural insights. Netnography aims to provide significant outputs to the marketers to help them with better decision-makings while discovering characteristics of the online communities by analysing their images, texts, symbols and the language in general (2021). Now, it is time to take a look at the advantages of netnographic approach for creating successful marketing strategies. 

What Netnography Offers to Marketers and Companies?

Here are some convincing reasons why companies and marketers need to pay attention to netnography (Netnography is Digital Anthropology — Netnografica, 2021):

• Brand perceptions can be easily recognised by netnography.

• Netnography provides significant insights for companies that want to achieve their goals in brand positioning and repositioning.

• Ensuring meaningful cultural insights, netnography also helps companies and brands for customer segmentation process.

• Netnography is a great tool to measure the customer feedbacks before the development and innovation of new products.

• Netnography can be used as a trend identification tool by determining future trends of the market.

• Netnography can guide to a new service models for value creation such as crowdfunding.

• Netnography can lead to an effective social media strategy by increasing customer reach.

• Netnographic insights helps to activate emotional connection between customers and brands.

Keywords: Netnography, Cultural Insights, Social Behaviour, Ethnography, Social Media, Marketers

Ilgin Damla Omay

References and Sources

Martech Zone. 2021. What is Netnography? | Martech Zone. [online] Available at: https://martech.zone/what-is-netnography/ [Accessed 7 April 2021].

Netnografica. 2021. Netnography is Digital Anthropology — Netnografica. [online] Available at: http://www.netnografica.com/netnography-101 [Accessed 8 April 2021].

Preventviolentextremism.info. 2021. [online] Available at: https://preventviolentextremism.info/sites/default/files/White%20Paper%20%E2%80%93%20Netnography-%20The%20Marketer%E2%80%99s%20Secret%20Weapon.pdf [Accessed 8 April 2021].

The Balance Small Business. 2021. How Market Research Is Like Anthropology. [online] Available at: https://www.thebalancesmb.com/investigate-social-media-like-an-anthropologist-2297153 [Accessed 8 April 2021].

What are the Benefits of Volume-Data Storage and How it is Beneficial to Digital Marketers?

Data storage is a medium to store a huge amount of Information. Any electronic document can be store in less space than any paper document. This information converts into bits and can be stored in the electric circuit. The storage volume can be removable hard disk but it doesn’t remove physically from computer or storage system. This Volume data storage is flexible and it can contract or expand. In it, files and documents can record digitally and saved in a storage system for future use. If we talk about a business point of view data is the most important asset. So in today’s digital world, the best method of volume data storage is websites, blogs, social media sites. Making a high-quality website for storing data is a good option so that it can include information about things that customers find relevant and interesting. With the help of data storage, it’s easy to get the contact information of the customers. Digital marketers have to deal with a large amount of data on different sources like social media, websites and that collected data helps them to do marketing digitally in the digital world. Not only this there are many other data management or data storage platforms where digital marketing experts can store their data and use it whenever they needed. Here if we talk about different marketing which is called content marketing, in content marketing data storage is very much important because if we don’t have any accurate data or we are not able to make proper and right content and in content marketing strategy data plays a vital role especially when we don’t have any idea about data analytics. By capturing or recording data digital marketers are better to understand what content or marketing strategies and methods are required for getting a better result. The things which come in mind for storing huge amount of data for a long time is optical media like DVD, and external USB - SSD drive for storing last 20 years as well as Network Attached Storage (NAS) with RAID: These have high performance magnetic hard disks and are your best option. Because of RAID, there is failure protection. I am not sure that original disks can last 20 years, but you can replace them (NAS allows hot-swapping of disks). In volume data storage it helps to keep a record of all past and activities of digital transactions. It also helps in data analysis so that any marketer can forecast the trends of the future market. It also provides flexibility and mobility and storage is easy and can move from one place to another, not only this it’s easy to forecast the better strategy formation. With the help of volume data storage decision-making is easy for the management which benefits the company’s business. 

In conclusion, it is not easy to manage and recognize the huge amount of data for the human brain so that with the help of data storage it is easy to keep a record of the day to day activities which increase the efficiency of the employee in many ways as a result easy to analysis the market scenario that helps business winning out in today’s competition.

Damanvir Kaushal

Keywords

#Volume Data storage

#Digital marketing

#Data storage

#Digital Transformation

#Social media

References and Sources :

• https://searchstorage.techtarget.com/definition/volume
• https://techterms.com/definition/volume
• https://docs.oracle.com/cloud-machine/latest/stcomputecs/ELUSE/GUID-6ACE7B13-442B-459C-8868-566F1CB65E3F.htm#ELUSE-GUID-6ACE7B13-442B-459C-8868-566F1CB65E3F
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/ifs/storage-device-stacks--storage-volumes--and-file-system-stacks
• https://kt.cern/competences/high-volume-data-management-storage

What Is Big Data and How It Affects the Way of Decision Making?

In the era of digital transformation and emerging technologies, one cannot deny the importance of Big Data analytics which directly affects and enhances the decision-making process of an organisation. Here comes the question. What is Big Data and why effective usage of Big Data is crucial for companies who wants to achieve their digital marketing goals in the long term?

Components of Big Data

Big Data can be defined as large amount of data which is also fast and complex that makes the analysing process unmanageable with conventional methods. According to Laney, the components of Big Data are the three Vs which forms the definition of the term as high volume, velocity and variety of data to be processed. Volume means the various different sources that organisations can benefit for data collection such as connected IoT devices and social media platforms. Velocity describes the high-speed streaming of data including near real-time actions. Variety expresses the different formats of data which can be occurred both structured or unstructured such as email, video or financial transactions (Big Data: What it is and why it matters, 2021). Two more Vs which are entitled value and veracity have been added to the three Vs by some sources to emphasise the importance of the value and truthfulness of the data (What Is Big Data? | Oracle Ireland, 2021).

Why Organisations Analysing Big Data?

A survey was conducted in 2017 indicated that the number of companies which have adapted Big Data analytics has been dramatically increasing in the recent years. Moreover, the survey reveals the most common purpose of using Big Data as data warehouse optimisation which requires an integration of Big Data platforms such as Hadoop and Spark into an existing data infrastructure of an organisation. The main reason of using Big Data is followed by the purpose of analysing social media and streaming data coming from IoT devices which considered as data lake sources to define the unprocessed data, and exposing fraud detection (Watson, 2019). Once the organisations know the sources of Big Data, they will be able to manage and store the data by the help of Big Data platforms or cloud spaces, and then analyse it in terms of relevancy for the business purposes to have better, evident-based and data driven decisions in the marketplace that they compete (Big Data, what it is and why it matters, no date). It could be said organisations that are aware of the significance of the Big Data and have ability to process and analyse it properly, are more likely to have meaningful insights from their customers and make successful decisions while applying their digital marketing strategy.

Big Data Applications

There have been many applications of Big Data that have emerged as Natural Language Processing including Digital Assistants such as Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri, chatbots which are used for customer support, and Visualisation Systems including Drones and Facial Actions Coding Systems (FACS). For example, the company P&G used a coding software to analyse facial expressions of people for testing the scents of its new product which ended up with more precise and successful predictions of the software rather than what participants said (Hugh J., 2019). Another example of using Big Data shows how Amazon has been collecting detailed purchase data from its customers since then and how it lets other companies to access its ad portal to make them reach to the specific target audience (17 Big Data Examples & Applications, 2021).

Finally, using of Big Data by many companies brings governance concerns and security issues as well. To protect the privacy of personal data, regular controls of service providers need to be reviewed and the compliance with laws and regulations should be considered.

Keywords: Analytics, Big Data, Decision Making, Digital Marketing, IoT, Social Media

Ilgin Damla Omay

References and Sources

Built In. 2021. 17 Big Data Examples & Applications. [online] Available at: https://builtin.com/big-data/big-data-examples-applications [Accessed 16 February 2021].

Hugh J., W., 2019. Update Tutorial: Big Data Analytics: Concepts, Technology, and Applications. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, pp.364-379.

Oracle.com. 2021. What Is Big Data? | Oracle Ireland. [online] Available at: https://www.oracle.com/ie/big-data/what-is-big-data/ [Accessed 16 February 2021].

Sas.com. 2021. Big Data: What it is and why it matters. [online] Available at: https://www.sas.com/en_us/insights/big-data/what-is-big-data.html [Accessed 16 February 2021].