social media chatter
This cartoon is part of a series I developed with Motista to parody the state of traditional market research. Motista is giving away a signed print of this cartoon to the first five readers who share a comment or suggest a cartoon idea at the Motista blog.
It cracks me up whenever I see a PowerPoint presentation that uses social media quotes as support points. The quotes are intended to demonstrate that there’s a whole movement of consumers that agree with the argument in the presentation.
Skimming social media is DIY market research. Marketers can do it themselves without requiring agencies, budget, or very much time. It can be tempting to use social media quotes in lieu of traditional market research.
Yet verbatim social media quotes are meaningless when taken out of context. It is ridiculously easy to find social media quotes to support any possible position you choose to take.
There can be a lot of noise for very little signal.
Motista co-founder Alan Zorfas expands this topic on their blog, including this insight:
“Current research options actually separate us from what’s really motivating our consumers. In a continuous state of compromise, the marketer here has to consider the expense, the wait, the time and the faults of existing options.”
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I love your cartoons, but feel I have to make a controversial comment about this one:
Why wonder – or even care about – what consumers think?
In my years I’ve seen people take out of quant studies and focus groups exactly what was needed to support a pre-determined proposition that senior management had already “bought”. That people now use carefully selected social media quotes isn’t surprising – and it meets the current biz philosophy of faster and cheaper (what could be better?).
All this while the “amazing” and “awesome” Apple plows on doing what it thinks best apparently without the “benefit” of consumer research.
Instincts? Intuition? Compassion? Empathy? Vision? You tell me…
Market research is most effective when it is an aid to judgment. It is best-applied when it helps teams develop a more intuitive feel for their consumers, customers and markets.
It goes awry when it is used to substantiate a priori conclusions by a company, or when it is used to try to eliminate risk (vs. identifying and aiding the mitigation of risks).
I would argue Apple does a lot of market research, but the approaches they use are more iterative (beta testers, lead users, etc.) to get to the answer, vs. traditional qualitative and quantitative techniques.
The bottom line is that a key contributor to product failure in market is failure to understand the market and design the right product for it. This demonstrates the need for market research, but it also calls for using the right MR tools for the job.
There’s nothing wrong with littering presentations with quotes from social media as long they faithfully represent the sentiment of the conversations that are taking place. If lots of people are saying good things, then why not report this.
Of course, picking out outlandishly positive quotes is misleading, but it’s very tempting to do so when you’re trying to big up your brand to a cynical internal audience.
Tom, it’s a great point, although I’ll say that marketers have been self-selecting Great Thoughts From Consumers from focus groups, spouses, country clubs…well, you get the idea, forever. Social Media is just the latest convenient source. The thing is, running quantitative analysis on social media chatter isn’t expensive or time-consuming.
In any case, I disagree with Jerry: we must absolutely listen to consumer input, reactions and yes, commentary. Not for direction on what to do, mind you. Rather to gain understanding so that insights are applicable in the marketplace.
http://twitter.com/SteveS1
Hi Tom,
Listening/monitoring is so much more difficult than it sounds. I agree with Steve, social media is just an added channel in which to do this. We have to be asking the right questions, and using the proper data sources. And then of course, understanding how to analyze it…. well that’s a book in itself.
Love the cartoon. hilarious.
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