MarketTools Blog

With the year’s end coming, pundits are looking to the social media sphere to come up with their predictions for the newest trends for 2012.  But when it comes to looking for practical direction from the wild and wooly world of social media, I’d advise a little caution. 

Imagine asking a person on the street for directions to a nearby restaurant.  You follow those directions, but you can’t find the restaurant.  You backtrack your route to find the person who gave you the faulty information.  “Hey, mister,” you say.  “Your directions were useless!”  The stranger answers, “But you never asked me if I knew where the restaurant was!”  Social media can seem like it’s populated by people who are more than happy to give you directions even though they have no idea where the restaurant is.

In a previous blog post, I talked about social media in context of divergent and convergent research, the two major market research approaches.  The idea of divergence is to collect and sift through assorted facts, factoids, lies, opinions and hyperbole in order to create hypotheses.  It doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that the world of social media would help us come up with interesting hypotheses when we are in the divergent phase. 

However, to be accurately predictive, we need to use discernment – the ability to figure out what really matters.  Social media is largely devoid of discernment; it’s millions of mouths speaking at once.  To cut through all that noise, maybe we need a machine like the one Professor Xavier of X-Men used, to scan the minds of everyone in the world to find brainwaves and thoughts that were relevant to him.  We’d have to reach that level of mutative ability to be able to use social media in a directive and proscriptive way.  Until then, we need to be careful about using unfiltered social media feedback and recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the source. 

In my view, the key to making sense out of the volume of social media noise is in the difference between unguided and guided conversations.  I don’t think we have the right tools yet to consistently make sense of unguided conversations, which are the bulk of today’s social media.  I’m much more comfortable using guided conversations – discussions which are lightly directed by a facilitator or a benign dictator – in my divergent research. 

I’m a fan of the online market research communities we run at MarketTools – online communities are a subset of social media where we can create appropriate platforms for focused discussions between our clients and like-minded customers.  Researchers know that they’re interacting with the right people, and they’re able to keep them on topic to elicit the thoughtful feedback they need.

So, as we look forward to identifying trends and crafting strategies to tackle the year ahead, don’t just look to Twitter, Facebook, and the like as your main source of predictive wisdom.  Instead find the right people to talk to and create a place where you can listen thoughtfully, ask questions carefully, and wrap your mind around a narrower, but more comprehensible, set of conversations.