Knowledgeistics

At the outset of this project, we want to lay out why social media market research (SMMR) is a valid area of interest. After all, there are thousands of emerging trends you could be spending your precious blog time understanding – what sets SMMR apart?

More importantly, especially if you are a consumer insights/market intelligence/marketing manager, why should you care about this project?

There are three central reasons.

1) The price of qualitative market research has become astronomical. Think about this one. You want to get four groups of 8-10 young men who are college graduates and own at least one video game console (or single moms, or women 50+ years, etc.) in a room together for 2 hours and ask them questions. Intuitively, how much do you think this should cost?

If the answer isn’t $15,000+, we’re on the same page. The costs of traditional focus group research (not to mention IDI’s or “ethnographies”) has become astronomical.

In the age of Facebook, Twitter, and iPhone apps, is paying a focus group call center really the best way to find participants?

2) Gathering a group of pre-selected individuals to whom you will ask a list of pre-selected questions is a fundamentally flawed research model. The central goal of qualitative research is to understand the real lives of your current or potential customers. This is harder in focus groups because you are controlling the conversation, not them. Inherently, active observation biases the results. This explains the extraordinary popularity of “ethnographic” market research, which few academic anthropologists would recognize.  However, we are now fortunate that, for many demographics, our customers are sharing their thoughts, reactions, and needs (for free!) in their native environments.  Key caveat: this is not to discredit the importance or usefulness of traditional research methods, but only to show that they certainly have no monopoly over methodological rigor.

3) SMMR makes it easy to expand your research universe without exploding research costs and timelines. For example, say Serta is undertaking a study on the mattress market.  However, they want to expand the focus to understand not only the existing market options but also what “rest” itself means to its potential customers.  With traditional research methodologies, the team would have to construct elaborate screeners focused on certain demographics, with every effort limited by the fact that they will need to pay $300-$400 for every contact point.  Were they to leverage SMMR, they could harvest from a much larger pool, and after a thorough analysis of the data, understand from the universe of options where further research is warranted and what the key demographics are.

Two lessons here: A) SMMR can shrink your research costs and timelines and produce more useful results; B) When you let the market lead (instead of your pre-determined demographic screens and focus group guides), you open a world of possibilities.

As we continue this project we will be testing these benefits, and hopefully adding others.

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