CGM for Market Research

Some of the most challenging questions I get asked come from the market research space. Researchers want to understand everything about who’s posting.

“Are they in my target market?” (Hard to tell.)
“What are their demographics?” (No way to know for certain. We can take a stab a psychographics though.)
“Where are they located?” (Difficult to pin down.)
And perhaps most importantly, after listening to some of my answers to the previous questions, “How can I make any recommendations with confidence without knowing any of that?”

To be completely forthright, it’s not an easy question to answer, but there is in fact an answer.  

Unlike traditional market research methods, such as telephone surveys and focus groups, the quantifiable analysis of vast bodies of unstructured, unsolicited consumer feedback is a relatively new concept. It lacks the forty or fifty years of rising sophistication accumulated in classic research practices; it might even be better described as an art than a science. CGM analysis techniques are improving rapidly, with significant enhancements in metadata extraction over the years. Links can now be tracked, advanced mathematics used to perform relative influence calculations, more information about the person posting can be gathered, locations better identified, and likely most noteworthy, the active posting base has expanded greatly, with a much wider cross-section of individuals participating in the medium. That said, even with all these advances and the diversification of the user-base, the analysis is still are not as refined as it could be; CGM analysis still can’t yet tell you if the prevailing opinion expressed online is representative of your target market, or only present in a different group.

The key to using CGM analysis data with confidence is thus to recognize that it’s a compliment complement (thanks Paul) to traditional market research, and not a replacement for it. CGM analysis can surface previously unknown issues, provide deep insight into the buying cycle, and generate very rapid real-world feedback, along with a whole host of other things. While it can’t confirm a hypothesis, it can generate one, and that may be its greatest feature.

There is however one other very important thing to keep in mind which bridges market research, PR, and traditional marketing functions. Sometimes, many of the traditional research questions just don’t matter. You may sell to 20-year-old white women from Kansas, and the poster may be a octogenarian man from California, but if your potential consumers type your product name into Google, and the octogenarian’s commentary comes back first, that commentary is going to have a strong impact on product perception. Due to the interconnected nature of weblogs and message boards, and the way search engines determine link rank, CGM postings often have disproportionably high standings in search results.  Combine this with the ever growing the number of people doing pre-purchase research on the internet, and suddenly CGM’s weight grows appreciably, and the whole concept of target market needs to be revaluated.

In short, smart market researchers will use CGM analysis for it’s strengths, even if the results don’t fit neatly into a traditional model, and shouldn’t forget that opinions on the internet do more than reflect consumer perception, they influence it.

market research, marketing, public relations, media, blogging