Comments on: Social media: what it means for market research

By: market research

market research — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:40:10 +0000

Nice post. I do agree with you that social media is doing great job to provide important information to market research companies. It will helps them to understand better certain things. Market research provides you a range of market research information that will help to aid your decision-making. The research could cover your external customers, your internal customers or a specific market study.

By: Gaelle Normand

Gaelle Normand — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:10:59 +0000

Hi Al, thanks for your interesting comments, I agree entirely. Like you, I don’t believe that social media, though a valuable part of the research toolkit, is a one-stop-shop. I do believe software is essential for keeping analysis manageable, if only to filter out repetition and spam, but marketers absolutely need skilled human analysts to draw the correct conclusions.

As my colleague Ben Leet wrote in a recent uSamp blog post, despite the rise of social media and the direct channel it gives brands to their customer base, marketers still need the trusted eye of an MR expert to understand consumer behaviour at a deeper level.

Best, Gaelle

By: Al Clarke

Al Clarke — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 07:17:41 +0000

Gaelle,

Great article which sparked two thoughts that I’d welcome your comments on

1. Social media may be the latest craze, but it is not the answer to every marketing need. It can’t fix search, PR, advertising, CRM, brand, prospecting, loyalty, customer care etc etc in one easy channel. Sure, it may be possible to use it for market research in the same way it may be possible to use the letters page of the national newspapers as a source for market research. What do I mean? You may get lucky and find a well structured, balanced insight from a targeted individual in a letter in the paper or in a tweet or blog. But in reality you will probably hear from people who have strong views motivated by some reason but are they representative of the brand, issue or market? Would you add social media as a ‘source’ for research? Yes, I would – but not as the only source, and it must be balanced.

2. The rise of a new and important role – the social media analyst – a must for organisations taking social seriously (and they should). You say that the scale of social media comment means market research cannot be conducted manually and that we need to use software. Mmm. That’s where I get edgy. Would you use software to filter the outputs from a focus group where you have people giving their reactions? Not me. I think it has to be done manually, but it can go through a ‘coarse filter’ through software as natural language technology improves. This is essentially the same argument as SM aggregation tools such as Radian6, SM2, BrandWatch etc. Great software, fine charts and genuinely useful insights – they provide a good top level view and deeper results (to varying levels of accuracy) within the bounds of the latest algorithm for searching key words and phrases. However to get the very best out of them (and I have used them all) you need to do the heavy lifting by human eyes after the rough filtering.

Nothing in life is free. Social is not free. It’s not even cheap. But if the objectives are right, and the appropriate resources applied it can deliver a good result.

Thanks for getting it out there Gaelle.