Social Media and Market Research

Earlier this month Brad Bortner posed this question in The Forrester Blog For B2B Market Research Professionals:

"Are MROCs [Market Research Online Communities] the next big thing in market research, and will they eventually take measurable share from traditional qualitative research?"

Sentient Services has been working in online qualitative for a few years now through asynchronous bulletin board focus groups. While you give up a lot in moving away from a face-to-face interaction (body language, vocal intonation, etc.), in an asynchronous online group you have a lot of different strengths.

1. Less time restraint – respondents have more time to think, they can look up notes and do “homework” assignments. Additionally, we can let side conversations go and see if the tangent provides additional insight
2. Broader coverage – asynchronous participation means that respondents aren’t locked into 6-8pm ET, making time zones a non-issue. This translates to breaking down some geographic boundaries.
3. Bigger groups – we’re not limited to the capacity of a conference room, meaning that we “seat” at least 12 participants per group (vs. 6-8 participants in a traditional group).

While we’ve previously scrutinized sample goodness when using social networks for market research and the value of polling features in LinkedIn, I believe MROCs (private online communities focused on research) are just an extension of online methodologies we already see. Instead of recruiting participants to one online discussion or survey, they are being recruited for continuing feedback on a variety of topics. And MROCs will impact both qualitative and quantitative research – it’s just as easy to host a survey in an online community as it is a forum discussion.

What are your thoughts on MROCs? What other evolutions do you foresee in the research industry?

Sentient Services (Ubiquity Marketing Un Summit 2009) V1

Presentation from Paul Janowitz (Founder, Sentient Services) at the 2009 Ubiquity Marketing unSummit.

Covers the current state of research in a customer driven web2.0 world. Contains tips and resources for entrepreneurs to leverage free and inexpensive market research techniques.

Sentient Services (Ubiquity Marketing Un Summit 2009) V1

View more presentations from Paul Janowitz.

And, one more CNN.com article featuring Sentient. Forgot about this one.

Forgot about this one - looking at e-commerce and site usability for CNN.com profile. Article covers cart, shopping path, branding, design, messaging, and SEO. It is here.

Sentient featured on CNN.com

I was just interviewed by CNN.com regarding web usability and design for a small business website make over. Always fun to do this and see the great ideas entrepreneurs come up with, and then help them bring them to market in a user-centered manner. Article is here.

Just how useful is the new LinkedIn polling feature?

LinkedIn recently added a new polling feature to their business social networking site. While LinkedIn’s own blog touts this new feature as a way to finally tap into the minds of the highly coveted business professional segment, its seems to fall significantly short of this.
I have been hearing about Linkedin’s upcoming polling feature for a while now and was looking forward to the launch of this new application. After taking several polls and going through the features and capabilities, this tool lacks the ability to truly gain much insight into a business or delve into the minds of business professionals within a targeted segment. Allowing only one question to be asked simply does not provide any real opportunity to gain much insight. Instead, similar to Facebook’s polling tool, it seems to be less of a true research tool and more of a glorified general market surveying tool to which questions must be generic, similar to that of an MSN or CNN poll.

The major limitation of this tool is being sure those taking the survey are truly qualified. Even if you utilize the targeting features that are provided (which are job function, seniority, industry, gender, age and geography – all very nicely presented and easy to use), you have no way of being sure your poll is being answered by qualified respondents since there is no ability to ask pre-qualifying screening questions (i.e. correct company size range, has decision making authority for your product or services, etc.) . This type of feature is definitely needed when you consider surveying current or potential customers within your business market and therefore limits the type of questions you can ask.

As Tom H.C. Anderson pointed out in his blog on social networks and market research last year, this type of tool is not truly useful for gaining specific insights about your customers. Walking through the “Browse Polls” tab anyone can see that this tool is being used for exactly what its capabilities have allowed – selling services (i.e. Do you need flash design on your website?) or generic questions (i.e. What has happened to the value of your house this year?). I am not sure how either of these really gives you any special insight into any of the rich and robust information that business professionals have to offer. And as a LinkedIn member myself, these type of polls do not motivate me to participate and do not utilize any business knowledge I have gained over the years.

As more social networks move toward providing tools for companies to gain insight into target customers in the future, I hope they consider the true purpose of why people would want to poll these individuals, which is to gain real insight into your customers wants and needs so you can offer the best product for them, and how it relates to the customer segment they represent. In a time where online surveys pop up on almost every website, there needs to be a compromise between not overloading members with lengthy surveys but also allowing for truly insightful and valid surveys that can tap into the knowledge base their community has to offer.

With that being said, LinkedIn is sitting on a goldmine of respondents that are most likely very qualified and vetted given their LinkeIn profile. Using this source is most likely going to reduce the number of “bad” or “fake” business respondents and give one high quality respondents. What is lacking now is the tool to ask meaningful questions to these high quality respondents. I hope to see this come soon!

Have you used the LinkedIn polling tool? Has it been useful to your company in gaining insights into your customers’ actions, wants or needs?

A moving video.

Social justice is lacking around the globe. Social media is growing. Can social media and the internet "change" the world. Not overnight but they can help spark ideas, collaboration, share resources, get education to places it has never reached and connect you, I and others through content like the video below. Enjoy and spread the news, change the world.



http://www.fallingwhistles.com/

Google and Eye-Tracking

A post from the Official Google Blog caught my eye last week: Eye-tracking Studies: more than meets the eye.

As Google points out, most people are not conscious of their eye movement, especially when doing something as mundane as a web search. Eye-tracking data lets you identify which elements of a webpage (or other stimulus) are viewed, and in what order. Just as importantly, you can identify elements that are not viewed - which may be the reason why task completion, ad recall or messaging breaks down.

In my opinion, eye-tracking is most powerful when it is combined with traditional think-aloud usability protocol. At Sentient, we do this with a little bit of a twist - first we start by allowing the user to complete a series of tasks without interruption from us to capture task completion and eye-tracking data without interference from trying to hold a conversation as well. Then we have the user walk us through what they were thinking and doing in a qualitative debrief.

By delving into a qualitative debrief after a user completes a task while their eyes are tracked we can learn the why behind what they did. For example:

1. Did they linger on an element because it intrigued them or confused them?
2. Why did they look at one navigation element, but then move to other navigation elements and click on them?

By adding eye-tracking to the usability arsenal, you get a rich interaction between the quantitative eye-tracking metrics and the qualitative insights derived from traditional usability methods.

Stats, Media and a new book

I was listening to XM Public Radio with Bod Edwards this morning and heard a fascinating interview with Joel Best. Joel is a professor at the University of Deleware and just published a book titled "Stat-Spotting: A Field Guide to Identifying Dubious Data". A timely book if there ever was one - on the heels of an election with data thrown everywhere, financial markets that are either melting down or poised to rebound right about now depending upon the numbers you read that day and of course all of the numbers released daily on growth/no growth by industry/sector and just about any other segment one might be interested in. And, of course, market research and all of our clients and colleagues that deal with data, its interpretation and implications.

The book is available on Amazon.com and here is the description from Amazon.com, that summarizes it nicely:

Are four million women really battered to death by their husbands or boyfriends each year? Does a young person commit suicide every thirteen minutes in the United States? Is methamphetamine our number one drug problem today? Alarming statistics bombard our daily lives, appearing in the news, on the Web, seemingly everywhere. But all too often, even the most respected publications present numbers that are miscalculated, misinterpreted, hyped, or simply misleading. Following on the heels of his highly acclaimed Damned Lies and Statistics and More Damned Lies and Statistics, Joel Best now offers this practical field guide to help everyone identify questionable statistics. Entertaining, informative, and concise, Stat-Spotting is essential reading for people who want to be more savvy and critical consumers of news and information.



Happy New Year!