Knowledgeistics

Posts Tagged ‘market research’

Verify user demographics -- one tweet only

Slate today has a story on the topic of “orphaned tweets” — user accounts that consist of one tweet only.  While Swansburg and Singer-Vine take the article in a hilarious direction by classifying the various kinds of orphaned tweets, the article points to a critical statistic relevant to managers considering social media market research.

A major Harvard study reveals that 10% of Twitter users are responsible for 90% of the site’s traffic.   Add to this an older Nielson study revealing that Twitter has a month-over-month retention rate of just over 40% and the prognosis for creating a wide societal groundswell on twitter is bleak.

This creates an imposing challenge for those looking to create valid demographic samples from Twitter.  One of the most popular objections to SMMR is that it is disproportionately limited to certain demographics.

The relevant question is whether this difficulty will be limited to Twitter or if it creates  problems for the idea of SMMR itself.  My answer has been that it is indeed possible to capture more diverse demographics, but there are three additional considerations.

1. Twitter might not be the best vehicle for capturing insight. Given the low insight available in 140 characters and the difficulty understanding demographics, other social media sites may be more appropriate for market research.  However, if Twitter continues to grow and gains mainstream traction, it’s search functionality will make it an invaluable tool.

2. Use SMMR before target demographics are finalized. Smart market research practitioners will integrate social media market research into their research plans in a way that leverages it’s advantages — casting the widest possible net for insights.  This knowledge should help inform the thinking as you progress to tighter demographics.

Properly understood, social media’s difficulty in expensively isolating demographics is in fact an advantage.

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.

Stephen Baker has an article out in Business Week advising companies, against the advice of many others in social media, to not start a proprietary corporate social community.

Money:

So instead of spending a fortune to draw employees, customers, and clients to your site, how about meeting them where they already are for free? Chances are lots of them are among the 200 million on Facebook and the 30 million on LinkedIn. And more of them are Twittering every day.

Stephen has step-by-step directions for leveraging facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to collect some preliminary insights into what the social media world is saying about your company. He oversimplies a bit — there are definitely places where companies can benefit greatly from having a proprietary community (a topic I’ll be covering in some depth later this week). However, no company should start with a proprietary system without first taking the 2 hours to follow Stephen’s advice.

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.

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.