Knowledgeistics

One of the still rather underutilized tools of the modern web and its vibrant social community is the ability to monitor what people are talking about. Unfortunately, like many tools it has its limitations and lots of room for more value-added services to take data and convert it to information and knowledge, finally leading to insights. Nevertheless, these new channels present a very cost effective manner of collecting consumer thoughts and opinion.

At the risk of repeating myself (and stating the obvious for some), many popular online communication mediums have built in search-and-monitoring features. Although not leveraged significantly for research, these channels provide an inexpensive way to get some of your market research questions answered, or at the very least learn what people think (or if they even care) about your particular topic of interest.

Let’s start with Twitter. Unless you live under a rock, you’ve noticed the increasing buzz it’s been getting lately as people post their thoughts in 140 characters or less. Ridiculed for many reasons, including the relevance of people’s posts, Twitter has nevertheless grown and started capturing the attention of the corporate world. And something that has really called to marketing folks, especially market researchers is the built in search feature.

The easiest way to illustrate this is with an example. Recently, NBC announced the possible cancellation of the Monday night series Chuck. Now I don’t know much about Chuck but it’s a great and very timely topic for the example.

I searched for Chuck, and here’s what I found.

Some useless content, but also some interesting tidbits. Obviously, some people are concerned about the cancellation (check out the second screenshot). Still others are talking about Subway and Chuck. Now I’m not sure what that’s about – could be a show-related promotion, or could be a user tradition. Either way, could be useful to learn more with additional targeted searches. In the hands of any experienced googler, Twitter can be a powerful and unique way to find out more about your audience.

Another very interesting return is the “XYZ more results since you started searching”. In the seconds it took me to read some of the main comments, there were 16 more comments. Right now the page lists 63 more comments. Wow, this is creating a lot of buzz. While I agree quantity does not signal quality – it would be folly to overlook such a metric. Imagine the uses for monitoring the response to tonight’s episode, or a new ad campaign? Twitter itself, lists some of the trending topics – top ones being related to Swine Flu.

Like most tools, this one is open to interpretation – and its value really only depends on how well someone leverages it. But combined with good analysis, researchers can find out more reading a few pages of twitter posts (selectively) than the transcripts for a focus group. Sure, twitter lacks the ability to control the conversation and answer specific questions, but it is ideal for early stages exploratory research. And who says you can’t start conducting market research with Twitter if you build your own programs? 140 word answers to a survey question – sounds promising for a start.

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