Social Media Adds That Spunk Missing in Traditional Market Research
While talking about Social Media to clients and friends I often pitch the completeness of the medium in terms of marketing. Social Media distinguishes itself from other marketing methods on the web because it goes beyond pure promotion, it goes beyond sponsored surveys that pop up on popular sites. Used wisely it offers the full circle of marketing for us to see – market research, advertising and feedback, and all this without the need to explicitly ask for any of them.
So when I found this interview on Marketing Sherpa with J.D. Power and Associates I was immediately interested. J.D. Power and Associates as most of you might know is a market research firm and have been using social media for data mining and according to them it offers a comprehensive and often a truer picture than traditional research.
Janet Eden-Harris, VP of Web Intelligence, (the interviewee ) says, “Essentially what we’re doing is collecting [this information] into a database, and we mine millions of posts every week and continually mine them,” she says. “It goes beyond demographics. It goes into what motivations do people have for buying or using a product or responding to a trend.”
There are some other important views that Janet shares that I believe in as well and hence completely agree with. Views like – survey questions are often met with a certain prejudice, that popular bloggers shape opinion of a community, that when you listen you take more than when you just want to hear, and so on (the Skoda PR debacle for instance). All in all it is an excellent blog post to read and gain some insight. It is also good for market research firms to read and update about what can be the way of doing their job a few years down the line.
From an Indian perspective though it might seem that this still needs some more time, because in comparison to the population of the country it’s web population still needs a few jumps to match. However, here the view of bloggers and web publishers in general being thought leaders and opinion shapers is a big point.
One often forgets that most people who spend a lot of time online also spend an equal measure offline and spread their thoughts and views there. So what you find on the web is not very distinct from what you find offline, and so data from the web might also stand the chance of being a reflection of the general view, even if it lacks volume.
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