Objectives, not technology, should drive groundswell strategies." It's almost poetic.
This is one of several good videos on the topic of Groundswell from the book's authors at Forrester Research, but ok, here's the real point: 'Listening' (to your consumer) is the discussion rage today regarding social media. Much is being said to the effect that social media will now allow marketers to (finally) be in-touch with their consumers. Well, any agency that says this, should be replaced -- ASAP. No doubt, social media is a turbo-charger when it comes to dialogue with consumers, but any agency with this view gives hint to the fact that they have little or no experience with the science of consumer marketing research. Forrester rightly urges marketers to get onboard, but they don't diss the value of traditional reasearch. There aren't many meaningful consumer brands that ever existed, prior to social media, without years of focus group research, attitude & usage studies, brand and advertising tracking surveys, various forms of purchase panel data, telephone, brand clubs and direct-mail CRM, etc., etc., and the timeless feedback from store managers and sales personnel -- not remotely ignorant of the wants and needs of their consumers. Social media is huge, for sure. With a growing world consumer population in the billions, real-time speed of information, not richness of learning, will be it's most profound impact. It represents many new things now possible or made easier to do than before, but the possibility of companies now 'listening' to their consumers (for the first time) gets too much attention relative to the other business implications of social media.
How reckless is it when someone who doesn't have research expertise with sampling methodologies and representation, or potential differences between 'claimed' responses and actual behavior, or the issues associated with 'group think' when openly dominant opinions overshadow others, or the appropriate uses for qualitative insight vs. quantitative data, and the list could go on, insists upon the idea that social media is the savior to lead marketers out of the darkness of not understanding their consumers? Such folks are well-intending, but for sake of following a new technology, they shun the lessons available from decades of the consumer marketing that often pre-dates their careers. As the saying goes, "those that do not learn from the mistakes of the past, are destined to repeat them."
A better line of thought when it comes to the power of learning from consumers online is the broader subject area of Web Analytics. In DMNews, Rick Weinstock, DirectGroup North America states, "...Businesses that were well-established long before the advent of e-commerce face unique challenges when it comes to analyzing consumer behavior. ...While the multichannel approach enables marketers to improve customer lifetime sales and the overall customer experience, it continues to be important to cater to your offline-only customers. ...Online activity for multichannel customers is often heavily impacted by recent offline promotions, skewing sales toward items appearing in print." The relevance here is that we really don't live in an offline or online world (with all of us now on our way exclusively to the online world), we live in a "multichannel" world. It's a multichannel world where offline and online experience is interrelated, and thus, offline and online marketing are interrelated. An intersection of Web analytics, relevant social media, sales data and traditional marketing research, all reconciled for consistency of implications for the brand business, may be my personal 'dream team' dashboard of choice.
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