Whenever I talk to clients about social market research, the conversation inevitably and quickly turns to listening platforms and how/if market researchers can use them. Platforms like those from Radian6 and Alterian are attracting a lot of attention right now due to the fact that social media have become so mainstream among online consumers in the US and increasingly so in Europe. And the hope among researchers is that these conversations, when tracked and analyzed appropriately, will yield meaningful insights that would have been hard to come by through other means.

The reality is that listening platforms require a significant human touch in order to sift through mountains of data and extract golden nuggets of insight. I truly believe that it’s not too much of a stretch for market researchers to get comfortable with the methodological challenges of this kind of research, such as the fact that you never know the true demographics of the sample. Instead, what’s holding market researchers back is that it’s hard to do this research in an efficient and meaningful (read: insightful) way using just a platform alone.

On Tuesday, Passenger announced that it is officially selling into agencies in the digital marketing and market research space. Here are some quick reactions on what this means:

First, this puts it in competition with other vendors (such MarketTools, Vovici, Globalpark) that will also sell into agencies and have a proprietary platform that they can decouple from their services.

Why would Passenger announce this as an explicit strategy? I can tell you from the calls I have with agencies that they see MROCs as a value-add to clients they are working with on social media or research. Also, community services (planning, ongoing management, facilitation, reporting) are the most expensive part of the equation, and it’s likely that many of the agencies that Passenger sells to either already have some services capabilities or will be willing to take more of them on at some point. This move meets a market need and diversifies Passenger's business channels with a potentially higher-margin offering.

Second, this announcement got me thinking about where the market for MROCs is headed, and I’ve got three main ideas:

For my current research on social media and market research, I’m interested in listening platforms (and the text analysis that’s usually packaged with them) for the purposes of mining the social Web – be it on blogs, open community sites, social networks or the like. 

There’s a lively debate around the value of social media listening for market research, and there are many people willing to share their opinion. Last week, I attended a Webinar on this very subject, hosted by Peanut Labs, with multiple guest speakers from the industry. Here are some of the key points that market researchers should consider when assessing the need for – and effort in -- social media research. 

“Process and methods need to be developed to make social media data be another source for Marketing Research” -- From Jean Davis, co-founder of Conversition, and former president of Ipsos Online, North America. This means:  Platforms need to be created with the market researcher in mind.  They must be able to reliably sift through online conversations to sort out low-quality data; apply weighting schemes to that data reflects that true share of volume that different sources have online; and create constructs so that data from social media can be proxied to represent common measures such as five-point scales and top-two boxes. 

I thought I would share a recent MROC case study from an event I highlighted in one of my previous entries. These are the main points of a presentation from Rich Keller, the global business director of Godiva. The real kicker in this story is that Godiva doesn’t even have a research department. The research fell to marketing, and one very passionate leader in Rich.

I recently attended a unique event hosted by three vendors who are, at times, competitors: Communispace, BrainJuicer, and OTX. It was a nice change from industry events, and a place to interact with top executives of each of these companies as well as a very nice mix of their own clients from large brands that any of us in MR would recognize.