Thursday, November 08, 2007
Community Powered Market Research
The company provides a turnkey community, and then extracts the insights from customer conversations. Network Insights says it creates a "network of networks" by analyzing the data about all of the topics of conversations.
This is a novel way of combining community with maket research. An advantage over traditional survey methods is that since the sum of the conversations are assessed in their natural environment, the customers' true feelings are likely more genuine and reflect a larger percentage of customers than if they were asked to fill out a sterile questionnaire.
However, building community may not work for all product categories (the customer quoted by the company deals in fine art, which people love to comment on), which limits this method of data collection. Also, if no one is talking about points that a company wants to know about, then there's nothing to analyze.
Market research should heavily weigh community input, and an automated way of parsing the comments can be an effective method. Of course so can blogging and reading the comments, but that can be too labor intensive for large communities.
Posted By John Gartner at 08:29 AM
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