e-Rewards acquires Conversition: A Marriage of Social Media and Market Research

Last week, e-Rewards acquired social media market research agency Conversition. Conversition applies scientific principles to the collection and analysis of social media data. Its solutions include TweetFeel, MatterMeter and EvoListen. Its product EvoListen, which is currently under development, collects data from online social media outlets; cleans, filters and weighs it, and then formats the information into quantitative data sets. This will allow e-Rewards’ clients to listen and analyze what customers are saying on social media.

According to e-Rewards president and CEO, Chris Havemann, with over half a billion consumers worldwide engaging in social media platforms today, “social media listening will continue to become an increasingly important way for businesses to collect valuable insights around the needs and wants of their customers.” E-Rewards’ acquisition of Conversition, along with Research Now in 2009 and Peanut Labs in 2010, signifies the strengthening of the growing importance of social media in market research:
• Social media is a progressively vital part of modern day market research because it is an important source of consumer insights. According to Forrester’s Technographics data, more than 80% of online US consumers regularly use some form of social media and such high numbers aren’t just restricted to developed markets. Emerging markets such as Brazil and China are also avid users of social media.
A global online panel provider will typically provide you with a 6 to 8 million actively engaged panel, but with a social media panel, you can have access to more than 600 million active users. This is what makes social media an important channel for market research.
• Listening to your consumers hasn’t been easier as it is with social media. Consumer conversations and feelings about your product or service, their interactions with peers, their recommendations and “likes” – can all help you create interesting and holistic profiles of your customer segments. You can analyze their conversations to better understand your product positioning relative to competitors, track your product and campaign performance, and generate new ideas and hypotheses that you can test through further research. E-Rewards’ acquisition of Conversition Strategies further affirms the importance of “listening” to customers in market research.
• Concerns about the representativeness of social media research and how to quantify it are being resolved by technologies like EvoListen, which make the unstructured nature of social media fit into the structured world of market research. This helps bridge the gap between market insights and social research. E-Rewards addresses this by providing a solution that provides some background around social media conversations to market insights professionals, which in turn helps them create a framework for their research. Moreover, it converts all listening data into terms that market researchers can relate to. 
OpenView Venture Partners is a Boston based venture capital firm that invests in expansion stage software companies. OpenView Labs is its consulting arm that helps OpenView’s portfolio companies with marketing, sales, market research and recruiting. Follow me at @fariarah