Knowledgeistics

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SMMR demos: more than the NPR set

One of the objections I will often hear while discussing social media market research goes like this.  “I understand the potential of SMMR to capture huge amounts of actionable insights, but won’t those insights all be generated by certain non-representative demographics (e.g. younger, coastal, urban)?”  This is definitely a relevant question and a serious concern.

Scott Monty, head of social media for Ford, has part of the answer.  Money statistic: there are 16.5 million moms participating in the blogosphere.  Granted, work needs to be done to further segment the demographic further, but rest assured the percentage of nearly all demos using social media is growing.

In this economy, it’s become popular to criticize economists and their favored principle of economic rationality. Commentators lament the shortsightedness of smart people who assume others think the way they do. It’s important to recognize that good problem-solving ability and general edification can sometimes hinder efforts to understand how “regular people” think and make decisions.

This trap can ensnare anyone, but it’s particularly pernicious for market researchers, and those of us in SMMR are certainly not immune. It’s important to do your homework when trying to understand a brand, product or company in an on-line context. In other words, hitting up facebook, twitter and technorati aren’t going to give you a good picture of that context and presence unless the target market concentrates their activity there. Those might be your favorite haunts, they might even have a broad user base, but that doesn’t mean they’re representative of the target customer or consumer. Sometimes the target is going to behave in ways that are unintuitive to you.

Here’s a small example. The much-beloved er, towel, Shamwow, has a website at Shamwow.com. A simple Google search for “shamwow” returns the official site first, with several review sites, news links about the spokesman’s legal misadventures, and a link containing the word “ripoff” not appearing until 9th place. If you run a search for “shamwow.com”, however, the 3rd link down, visible without scrolling, has a pretty harsh description:

Shamwow is a sham!! Do not buy this junk. These towels do nothing!! I take that back they DO push water around all over you counters but they don’t pick …

Well, that would certainly make me think twice if I’d run the search with the intention of buying. One might assume that a search for “shamwow.com” would furnish a high conversion rate, given that the user is presumably looking for the official site. Unfortunately, most of those potential sales are probably lost once the user encounters the above screed. If they had anticipated that search string and built it into their SEO strategy, they might have held onto them.

This example is truthfully pretty silly, but it does illustrate the point. You’re not the customer. Just because you would never search for something as dumb as “shamwow.com” doesn’t mean the customer wouldn’t (no offense, customer!) Never dismiss the behavior of real customers unless you can afford to do business without them.

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.