Have you ever wished you could use social media to conduct a focus group on your product or service offerings? No, you can't just open a Twitter account and say, "Hey, what do you think of our new recipe for pie?" But you can approach social media and use it for research and development two different ways: social media monitoring and directly seeking customer feedback. This is feasible even for a small business or one without a research-and-development budget.
The first approach is to use social media monitoring to gather intelligence about your company, product or service, competitors or industry. By listening to online conversations about certain topics your customers might be talking about, you can gather competitive intelligence that can inform your decision making and produce a better offering.
Let's say you make custom handbags and sell them from your brick-and-mortar location in San Francisco that and they sell fairly well. But you need some R&D or at least some market research to know if what you're planning to produce makes sense for the new spring line you intend to roll out in the coming weeks.
So you go to a free monitoring service like SocialMention.com or even invest in something a bit more sophisticated, like uberVu, for about $40 per month. You enter some keywords and tinker with a search until you start to see some relevant results for conversations occurring from users in or around Northern California. For instance, "My handbag needs more dividers. I can't keep my stuff organized," is a phrase you might see pop up a couple of times.
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Then you might notice that when people are talking about what their handbag or purse needs, they say the purse needs to be big enough to hold an iPad inconspicuously. And there's your new product idea harvested from raw data on the Web.
A second approach is to openly participate in social media and build purposeful relationships and connection with your actual customers so you can turn to them into your focus group. As an active social media participant -- building followers on Twitter, fans and likes on Facebook, readers of your blog or even subscribers to your email newsletter -- you're essentially growing your potential focus group every day.
There are four general steps to conducting research:
- Set the goals for the research.
- Establish the important questions to ask.
- Research and collect answers to the important questions.
- Analyze the answers to make decisions.
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How does that translate to practical application? Make a list of the product or service feedback items you might want to ask customers about. Then make a list of the information you'd like to know about your customers or prospective customers. Look at that list and pick the one or two major areas you wish you could solve with a little customer input or feedback.
Let's say your top priority is to get new product feature suggestions. Start identifying the important questions that you need to ask your customers. Is the handle sturdy enough? Would you change anything about the colors?
You don't need to be a market researcher to ask questions, but you should probably try to ask questions that allow your audience to give the most unaided feedback. For example, asking "Is the handle sturdy enough?" might be better asked by saying, "On a scale of 1–10 with 10 being most sturdy and 1 being least sturdy, how sturdy would you rate the handle?"
After you've listed the questions you want to ask, you just need to deliver them to an audience to answer. For instance, when it's time to find out what folks like or dislike about last year's line of handbags, or what they'd find useful in new versions for the spring season, you might post this question on your Facebook page: "What about your handbag could be better? Any need for more/bigger/smaller pockets? Are you carrying more accessories that we should account for?"
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Chances are, you won't get a lot of responses the first time you ask, but you can keep asking. Also, you can ask fans to subscribe to an email list specifically for "New Product Ideas & Feedback," or even offer incentives for participation with discounts to anyone who answers.
These two scenarios don't require big budgets, lots of scientific testing, or even geeks in lab coats. But they are legitimate research-and-development practices any business can use by implementing social media for R&D purposes.
This article is an edited excerpt from No Bullshit Social Media: The All-Business, No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing (Que Publishing, 2011) by Jason Falls and Erik Deckers.
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Comments:
Yes, now a days social media has become an very important translatable platform of our personalities and professions. It can be utilized in a very efficient manner
Social Media is a very valuable tool for gathering comments, insights and thoughts, but there is no real business value without a methodology to review, evaluate, validate and deploy. Unless it is simply the thoughts you are seeking!
Thank you for this excellent post on using social media for business research. So many business owners miss the importance of this concept. Even if you have a local business and few social media participants in your town, social media can still be a top notch research tool. What people are saying about your niche half way across the country are the same comments people are probably making on the other side of your town. Few bloggers have shared the importance of social media for business research to help the small businesses of the young business owners or the baby boomer entrepreneurs getting started. Thank you for filling in this gap.
Drop down the site walls and let news flow through communities and social networks, hence SMO a.k.a social media optimization! If you are online, don’t do business without it, you might be considered archaic. :) Thanks
Thanks for the post. Social media evolution is followed by the social media research and development.Thanks! "my emotion my thought" www.memth.com
Hi Jason & Erik! Good informative tips have been posted. Now I got an idea about how to use the social media for research and development. Thanks for sharing this post.
Thanks for sharing and reminding me to use 'Social Mentions'
Well said. Gathering intelligence and building relationships are some good ways to use social media for research and development.
These are great tips! Thanks for sharing, AJ
Yes a very helpful article ...
The important thing on Social media is to become an interesting point of reference, followers come as a consequence of that. But notice that this efforts in today's rapid media movement it is not the easiest task to achieve you need to invest time and efforts. as a reference you can try klout. although i believe is far from supplying real data.
Loved the article.... Putting together a study design on Facebook sometime next week!!! Thanks! All American Clothing Co. www.allamericanclothing.com
Really "digital media communication tools substantially our lives and how we treat each other and the world around us"
Jason and Eric, Your thoughts are terrific for small to midsize companies, or even larger companies who've been slow to adapt to social media. Social media monitoring has its use case scenarios in a business environment for these companies, especially as you mentioned for competitive analysis, understanding reach, fostering relationships, and finding industry leaders. It also helps with reputation management as well as several other things. However, many companies are finding out the hard way that after several months, social media monitoring loses it's value in comparison with social media business intelligence. Why? Social media monitoring doesn't give you the ability to bring in third party data / analysis (whether manually or automatically) or even manually import non-social data. This hinders the ability to correlate the data one finds back to their core business metrics. Tying everything back to the business is arguably the most important thing you can glean from social media; social media monitoring simply falls short in this aspect of connecting the dots. Social media business intelligence is the next step above social media monitoring. Not only does one get all the functionality of a social monitoring tool, but one can also mine social data for trends and correlate these trends with key business performance indicators. For example, taking stock data from Bank of America over a 3 month period of time and correlating this information with volume and cumulative sentiment data to get real-time insight as to why Bank of America's stock price dropped so dramatically. Here's an infographic exemplifying this in a surface-scratching way: http://www.evoapp.com/backtrack-america-the-price-bank-of-america-pays-for-being-behind-customer-sentiment-infographic The same can be done for political campaigns, like Herman Cain's recent plumment: http://www.evoapp.com/herman-cain-infographic For the c-suite executive, this relationship between social data and core business metrics is the arguably most important takeaway from social conversations online. ROI from these types of social analytics tools is all about tying everything back to the business; something social media monitoring tools fall short on. However, for many companies paying $10-100 per month for a social media monitoring tool is TOTALLY worth it; I'm mostly speaking out for large scale enterprises with the budget to shell out a couple thousand a month for deeper analytics. Great post. - Sergei Dolukhanov @sdolukhanov:twitter
In the past couple of years social media has a significant impact on the daily life of people. The global conversation that we now because of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, now the second largest search engine in the world after Google have, would have been unimaginable 10 years ago. In short, change social and digital media communication tools substantially our lives and how we treat each other and the world around us.
This article demonstrates yet another reason why it's absolutely necessary to create a thriving Facebook community, no matter why type of business you own. With the prediction that f-commerce sales will dramatically increase next year, there couldn't be a better time than now to start researching the best quality products to provide customers. Thanks for the great read! Lauren at Volusion www.volusion.com
This is great advice for a small business owner to follow. There are plenty of tools to use with free social media monitoring