Who else is talking about market research?

The fifth contribution to the GreenBook / NewMR collaborative review of social media research is from Affinio. You can read their full report by clicking here.

The core of Affinio’s investigation asked and answered the question “Who’s talking about market research other than market researchers?”

Affinio looked at the nearly 18,000 people who follow the ARF’s Twitter handle (@theARF) and segmented them into 10 tribes. As Affinio illustrate with a great diagram, 9 of the 10 tribes tend to be interconnected, but the 10th tribe, MRX people, is internally interconnected but relatively unconnected from the other tribes.

From the tribe identified as market researchers Affinio identified the top 6 hashtags used by this group, with the top 3 bing #marketresearch, #newmr, #mrx. Affinio then found everyone who had used any of these six hashtags on Twitter over a 30 day period. This produced 5.5 thousand people.

These people were then segmented into groups, with the largest and most compact group being market researchers. Other interesting groups included Career services/recruiters and Growth hackers/entrepreneurs.

One interesting group were Bollywood fans. Analysis by Affinio identified that these were people talking about the Bollywood show MR.X – i.e. a very different use of the tag #MRX.

Two key takeaways from this study are:

• Social data needs to be filtered to ensure that it focuses on the right people, for example making sure that fans of MR.X are not grouped in with fans of sampling theory.
• As with several of the other reports, market research is too internally focused, it needs to speak to a wider audience.

Read the full report by clicking here.

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