Is your Facebook update you? Is what you search for online what you want in real life? Does your online behavior reflect your personality? Yes, if Kevin Randall at Fast Company is to be believed, as he ushers in Market Research 3.0 (surely they could have come up with a more original term?), which includes, among others, a chilling, post-modern sounding concept, Sentiment Analysis.
I suppose the human mind is going to remain the perennial Holy Grail, but does “listening to conversations” and chatter on the Web provide a better insight than focus groups and surveys? Do we really speak our minds on social networking channels or do we say what we think we want others to see ourselves as? Do our Google searches reflect our complete personality? Is our online behavior reflective of our real character?
On the other hand does it matter really? Is our real self the consumer or is our social self? Isn’t a majority of what we buy dictated by the image we want to project of ourselves, our social image?
The real differentiator is that a focus group knows it's being monitored. I do believe the chances that a person will showcase an aspirational trait is higher in a focus group than on Facebook. Time is another factor- a focus group allows a person a limited amount of time to 'show who he is'; a careful Facebook mining exercise over time might show better trends in changing preferences and choices.
It is my opinion that many people do conduct their Facebook/Twitter/etc. practices to depict themselves in a favorabe fashion. If this were not the case, I do not think people would spend so much time updating their statuses when they have many other things they could be doing.
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3 comments:
The real differentiator is that a focus group knows it's being monitored. I do believe the chances that a person will showcase an aspirational trait is higher in a focus group than on Facebook. Time is another factor- a focus group allows a person a limited amount of time to 'show who he is'; a careful Facebook mining exercise over time might show better trends in changing preferences and choices.
I agree, iNFiNiteSaDNeSS.
It is my opinion that many people do conduct their Facebook/Twitter/etc. practices to depict themselves in a favorabe fashion. If this were not the case, I do not think people would spend so much time updating their statuses when they have many other things they could be doing.
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