It’s not often that a bunch of tweets keep you up all night. Yesterday was different. Led by some seriously smart folks managing the Northpoint Twitter Handle, we set out to discuss about Market Research. Via a Twitter debate.

#MRdebate, the implications of a traditional science in a world being overrun by social technologies.

An alert went off on my Facebook page a few weeks ago. I was not sure if I could make time. But Twitter is beast, it catches you unsuspectingly. 3.00 PM Friday evening. Before I knew, I was drawn in. How could a fundamental discussion on social media happen in my backyard without me adding my two bits?

It was @starrysari’s tweet that got me started.

With a broad stroke I replied. “Say yes to realtime research”.

This got @ankitagaba on my back. 

As I was thinking last night… There are many companies that are able to make simple meaning out of large volumes of data. A simple example is how Twitter found out that #MRdebate was the 6th most popular Hashtag in India around 4 PM on Friday.

Too lame an argument for you? Let’s pick up the threads from the twitter debate. As @vishaldwivedi9 listed out, some tools that a researcher can use.

Topsy, more a social search engine. Their analytics service seems a bit limited.

TweetReach as the name suggest, a twitter only tool. Created to, as they say, specifically understand how far a tweet or # reached. I looked up #MRdebate and to my astonishment the dashboard claimed that it had reached over 100,000 accounts. Could have impressed the social media naïve perhaps, but you soon discover gaping holes in their theory.

TweetGrader is a Twitter based influencer rating tool. I looked up my own influence to discover some very unflattering results. For some top secret reason however I score a grade of 92 on 100.

Radian6 then popped up. Raised by @basit_teaguy. As we all know, Radian6 does get a lot of global buzz, having some of the biggest names in the business using the platform.

Another name that has gotten some recent buzz India is Unmetric. Lighthouse Insights used the tool to rate India’s most engaged Facebook communities. While I like Unmetric and what it does in a simple way, not everyone agreed.

There were others too. But to me tools alone don’t do justice. No wonder then that Ankita posited on the lack of real sentiment analysis. Or the ability to find real – quantifiable meaning that market research typically looks for.
Frito Lays, for instance is developing new flavours of chips by getting people to create and vote for a flavor by clicking on an “I’d eat that” button. A sort of crowd-sourced quali survey. Bobbi Brown, a cosmetic brand, asking users and fans to vote and bring back discontinued shades. Samuel Adams a beer brand, using its Facebook page to research and develop a crowd-sourced beer.From a pure Market Research perspective the key learning came from the tweets of @subtletea. Of what companies in the US are doing. He linked us into this story on corporate focus groups in New York Times, and how brands like Frito Lays, Bobbi Brown, Samuel Adams, and others are using Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare for market research.

I read into the story differently. Rather than worry about semantics and the rest, what we are seeing here are companies making the best use of what is available. We know with social media and digital communities we can get feedback from millions of people easily, at little or no cost. At a scale no market research company can match. So brands are getting there and using it, not just for research, but for engagement as well.

Finally, to the point that kept me awake. Imagine the power when companies are able to harness the power of millions of conversations or searches. This story in MediaPost tells us how Google is able to predict the success of video games sales up to an 85% accuracy using just search data.For market research using social media data, I think the real issue is the size of data sets. What are the tools that will aggregate them, parse them and help us start to make meaning in a deep and fundamental way? Stuff we at Cequity talk about a lot. We talk of Hadoop and Vertica. Tools aside, what we need is an MR company that can understand and work with big data, technology, and new analytical engines.

@subtletea spoke of Walmart acquiring Kosmix a few years ago. For a not-so-measly $300 million. This was a key moment in the life-cycle of a large company that works with terra and peta-bytes of data. This kind of research needs be understood and evangelized by Indian MR companies.

@natalyasaldanha threw this bit on “psychographic mapping”. Looking up online this seems like a segmentation and targeting approach.


To answer the questions raised at the #MRdebate, I’d say. Let there be noise. Soon it will make music.

PS: I don’t know if there were as many MR people in the debate as there were SMM folks. Do you see an issue there?

Nishad Ramachandran, Vice-president and Head, Digital Experience at Hansa Cequity who is a part of the Northpoint faculty and teaches Digital Storytelling. Feel free to ask any queries in the comments section below.

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