I was speaking on the Future of the Industry at the ESOMAR Panel Research 08 conference in Dublin last week, an international market research conference. Over the two days of the conference, a lot was said about social media and online communities (see previous posts on lessons we can learn from the team at MomConnection). Speaking in the last session on the last day is always more difficult, and I wanted to leave the people at the conference with something to think about. So I spoke about two issues we have seen develop FreshNetworks.
Firstly I spoke about how online communities, and more importantly the ability for consumers and brands to talk directly with each other using social media, is changing the client-agency relationship in research and other marketing services. Whereas previous agencies played the role of standing between the consumer and the brand (or the client and respondent in market research terms), now their role is more to facilitate these two groups interacting directly with each other. This sounds like an easy change but really it isn't. It shifts both the role of the agency (from intermediary and translator to facilitator and advisor) and it throws up it's own problems. In the research industry, for example, the agency, standing between brand and consumer, has an important role to play ensuring that any research is conducted in an honest manner, designed and carried out to make sure that the results are meaningful and that business decisions can be made on them. With the role of the agency and client changing, there is a need to change processes and techniques. The first step is to recognise that the role has changed.
Secondly, and building on this I showed that whilst we've had online research communities for some time, to date they have typically been used as new ways of doing old things. Today, with the significant shift-change in the use of social media for customer engagement, online communities can now do completely new things. We are seeing more and more organisations building online communities as a way to engage with clients. Indeed just a few weeks ago a report from Gartner predicted such communities at more than 60% of large US firms by 2010. The challenge for the market research industry here is that, with so many communities being built and so many firms building them, they may lose the initiative. Communities are a brilliant source of insight (either planned and managed or insight through UGC). Organisations will begin to rely more and more on these tools as sources of insight and research, whether or not the community has been built or managed by a research firm.
So it was a bit of a "if we don't do it somebody else will" speech. A sentiment that really does apply to the market research industry today.
Some more reading
- What Does The Agency Of The Future Look Like To You?
- What CMOs Want from an Agency
- 'Generation V' Defies Traditional Demographics
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