Thursday, November 08, 2007

Community Powered Market Research

Startup Networked Insights has launched a new online platform for building community around brands, with the twist that the conversation are automatically mined for market research data.

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.

By John Gartner at 08:29 AM | Comments (1)

(1) Thoughts on Community Powered Market Research

Thanks for the write-up John. Like you said, reading blogs and their comments for insights about your customers is a great method as well, but many times that only represents the loudest people in the room. Tapping into a network of your customers represents a much larger community that includes quieter people with just as much influence and purchasing power.

Dan Neely
Founder and CEO of Networked Insights

Comments by Dan Neely : Thursday, November 08, 2007 at 12:30 PM

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