Are Social Networks a Threat to Traditional Market Research Techniques?
More and more senior roles in Market Research Supplier Companies are getting filled by non-MR specialists. It's an interesting and refreshing development.
I chatted last week to someone senior in TNS who is new to our industry - we touched on many topics, including the role of Social Media. He was particularly interested in the Client perspective on Social Networks - are they are a threat to traditional MR techniques? Here's the outcome of our conversation.
Q: There’s lots of buzz about Social Media being a huge source of potentially useful insights that can be accessed easily and cheaply by good webscraping. Do you share the excitement?
Edward Appleton: If I’m totally honest, not really. A few years ago, I think there was a general sense of excitement about the potential offered by online peer-to-peer engagement - brand owners could tap into naturally occuring “conversations” 24/7, discover the good, the bad or the plain indifferent that people - their end customers - were saying about them.
The possibilities of web listening - netnography, if you like - were exciting.
A few years on and I am still looking to get a grip on how efficiently Insights Professionals can actually derive value from Social Media. For me the jury is still out, and if anything I would say the evidence is building that whilst online buzz can play a role for Insights, for many categories, especially lower interest ones or B2B ones, the value appears limited.
The main issue I see is that people indeed chat online, but very often about all sorts of things not relevant to the marketing issue or research objective you have in hand.
Q: Where do you see Social Media being useful?
Edward Appleton: Pinterest - to be very specific - is a great tool for gaining inspiration and idea gathering at the front-end of the Innovation process. It’s a visual tool, people share their ideas in an idealized fashion - something that clearly separates it from any form of proper ethnography - and it can be useful to build hypotheses, gain ideas, insights even. It’s quick, easy to do and with zero out-of-pocket costs.
Obviously the value depends on the category. Home organization is great for Pinterest, which has a very heavy female bias, people love showing idealized interiors.
As for the bigger Social Media brands, we need to tread carefully. There are clearly concerns about using either Twitter or even Facebook for anything quantitatively robust: both have skews in their user profile, Twitter in particular has a pretty limited penetration in many countries.
Making sense of the output is also still a challenge - how much of what is “said” in online social media is going to be relevant to a given marketing situation? How do you analyze effectively, really getting to insights that make you go “Aha” without investing masses of manpower? Text analytic tools have still - to my knowledge - to improve to make the output really powerful.
That said, if you have a well visited Facebook page, for example, you can easily use it to generate consumer feedback - recruit a panel if you wish, have the time/resource to do so, or just run a competition asking people for new usage ideas for a given product. It’s qualitative, but if you’re looking to develop hypotheses, why not.
Q: What about Social Networks - Communities of interest Groups, for Example
Edward Appleton: Online Communities focussed on a particular field - education for example - can be extremely useful for Research - listening to people’s gripes and likes online within a certain field can be useful to help develop hypotheses on unmet needs.
It’s also true that sometimes online seems to lead to the “Disinhibition Effect” - afforded a degree of anonymity, people open up on topics they might not be so talkative about in person. Equally, I think there’s a systematic bias to the positive online - high-profile cases of ill-chosen online comments leading to serious negative consequences I would imagine leading more and more people to simply shut-up online when they disagree or feel negative.
Custom Panels and tailor-made online Communities have to me already proved their worth - 24/7 access to people who can give you feedback, help you develop an idea, with the unit cost per project dropping considerably compared to traditional ad hoc projects.
Open Innovation is another area of potential great value if managed well - it can accelerate the innovation process, you can access more people with different viewpoints, identify Lead Users amongst the people involved, put them different challenges. Does it necessarily mean that flop rates reduce, that processes become significantly more efficient? It’s just one step in the overall process - so there’s a limit to how much one can say that Open Innovation really is moving the needle.
Q: So, do you see Social Networks as a Threat to Traditional Market Research Techniques?
Edward Appleton: No - more of an enhancement, an addition to our tool kit.
The web is an enrichment to anybody who is tasked with understanding a problem or issue - it gives us reach and access to all sorts of audiences in a way that really wasn’t possible ten years ago.
For Research, it very much depends on what you’re trying to do, who the audience is you’re trying to understand, to determine to what extent Social Networks can help you efficiently.
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Curious, as ever, as to others' views.