This post was written by Patrick Gladney, Director of Research and Insights at SMG.
Last Thursday, I had the privilege of speaking at an American Marketing Association event entitled The Changing Face of Research and Implications for Marketers: You're not in an interview anymore, Dorothy.
Along with my distinguished co-presenters, John McGarr of Fresh Squeezed Ideas and Kristian Gravelle of Kraft Foods, we discussed how traditional research methodologies must evolve to get better answers and insights from consumers and data.
As somebody who's been talking to the market research community about social media for a few years, I was encouraged by the heightened interest in social media as a legitimate source of consumer insight. My talk stressed that social media research is not the panacea, but should be used to supplement different methodologies. Social media research provides a perspective on what's shaping consumer decisions, rather than serve as a proxy for things like consumer satisfaction.
One of the most frequent criticisms of social media research is what I like to call fuzzy metrics - things such as likes, comments, retweets, shares - all kinds of new measures that demonstrate some kind of consumer interest or engagement. The problem with these metrics is that for most, they offer little insight, and bear no relationship or connection to better known business metrics that can be immediately understood and appreciated by the CFO. My thinking is that these metrics are of too little value and risk losing the interest of marketers because they can't on their own be connected to business value.
But that of course all stands to change, particularly as social media listening and measurement systems become more deeply integrated with more familiar CRM platforms. In the not too distant future, if not today, brands will be able to link personal information and profiles to online discussion and move those people from the social ether into a sales funnel, in the same way that today people in the communications and CSR function are able to leverage social media brand monitoring systems to engage with customers to resolve customer issues and complaints. The implication for market researchers and planners is that they'll need to become more familiar with these systems or they risk missing out on an opportunity to add value. They must become familiar in working with online social media behavioural metrics because they will soon become integrated with transactional activity.