I just listened to a Pod-Cast this morning on a product called Clarabridge extolling the virtues of getting to know your customer through elegant data mining algorithms. The mining is done against a variety of online commentary sources where anonymity is considered equivalent to reason or objectivity.

This Pod-Cast was less than an hour after I finished the morning paper – which included a well-written column – “Is Twitter still cool?”. – If everyone is out there doing it, is it still cool? (Chris O’Brien, www.mercurynews.com) –.

I know that I have many more people following me on Twitter than I am following and that makes me feel guilty about not posting some narcissistic nonsense every day –. Not guilty enough, however, to motivate me to post something –

Maybe I am more cynical about all of this – After spending many years engaged in performing market research and applying the results, I believe the fundamentals are still true
 There are more sad love songs than happy love songs, because people who are happy DO IT rather than singing about it
 A fool with a tool is still a FOOL

Marketers are deluding themselves, if they think that mining the random ravings of random folks on public social media sites is going to give them a more realistic idea of the success of their product versus classic market research validated by sales data (leads, conversions, costs, maturity curves etc).

We know something about customer behavior
 80% of consumers buy a product or service because they need or want it. They take it home and use it, like it or don’t and just move along (to which Goodwill, Salvation Army, and local food pantries say “amen” ) –
 Self-nominated customer feedback comes from the 20% that really love or hate the product
 A profitable and growing business needs to understand the 80%.

Random feedback, even if well analyzed, is a risky basis for making future commitments of time, money, or other resources –. Data mining and analysis of social media comments does offer some insight into avenues that should be pro-actively explored to determine if they are or are not real predictors of future behavior. By offering some specific avenues of exploration, data mining reduces the time and cost of market research while, at the same time, making classic market research techniques more important than ever!!

This is a topic that is going to continue to challenge both the marketer and the market researcher as social media spread across more and more of the developed/developing world.

@Cordi and Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved
4/23/2009