London-based market research and social media insight agency Yolo Communications has signed a strategic partnership with Bakamo.Social.
The deal with the social media intelligence company, which operates out of London and Budapest, is based on “the shared vision that research is increasingly driven by insights gained from natural social media conversations”.
Yolo Comms expects clients to benefit from synergies in the shared offering with Bakamo.Social, specialises in uncovering unexpected insights from social media conversations.
Yolo Comms managing director Nik Harta told PMLiVE: “We are all witnessing the rapid growth of social listening and now believe we can exploit this data for market research. As an organisation’s investments in social media increase, they are looking for partners to help make sense of the data, which we can do.”
Harta suggested that healthcare and pharma firms have shied away from using social data because of “the (understandable) concern of negative implications and potential adverse event reporting”.
But he stressed that this has always been the case for other forms of research.
The partnership has already carried out work jointly on new clients. Harta mentioned a number of projects which had benefited, among them a campaign to uncover customer segmentation and product innovation for OTCs, a multi-lingual international study for patient insight on a rare genetic condition, and a consumer behaviour study on children’s nutrition as part of a corporate health campaign.
“It’s a really exciting time at the moment as the benefits and opportunities available with social listening insight are now noticeably extending beyond consumer brands to other industry sectors including pharma and healthcare where it’s rewarding to know we can make a difference,” he said.