Market Research, not a hot topic in Social Media

The fourth contribution to the GreenBook/NewMR Collaborative review of social media research comes from Andrew Jeavons at Mass Cognition.

Andrew started by trawling social media for mentions of “market research”, which produced over 7,000 mentions in a 24 hour period. The second phase looked at what else the people making these comments talked about, to generate a context. This second phase produced nearly half a million mentions.

The first point that the analysis shows is that the ratio of non-MR to MR mentions, amongst people who mention MR is immense (about 64 non-MR mentions for each MR mention, amongst people who talked about MR).

Amongst the other findings in the report are:

• A decline in the use of the term “market research” over the last ten years
• The “survey earn money” meme is still strong
• The term market research seems to be a phrase the wider population understands but does not readily use
• The MRX community is clearly identifiable, but does not link to the wider community

Many of the findings in this report accord with the findings in the other three reports and add further colour and definition.

One of the key trends from the project so far is the need for market research to communicate outside of the market research community. This study suggests that ‘business reports’ may be one useful tool in doing that.

Check out the other reports on this topic by clicking here.