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The Latest Trends in Market Research

May 26, 2009

Posted by: Michael Deichmiller in Digital

Online market research is not a new phenomenon and if you’re not using web 2.0 as a platform for this research you could be missing out.  As web traffic steadily increased, major market research and polling firms like Zogby and Harris Interactive added online systems to their suite of services, allowing them to provide a quicker, less expensive alternative to traditional research studies.  Also, online survey application start-ups like Survey Monkey and Zoomerang flourished but with all of this came risk – quality control. 

The one place on the web where people are usually honest is in the Social Networking space.  Most users of MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn have an innate incentive to be truthful and therefore can be targeted with surveys based on the submitted information in their profiles.  Market research conducted in these environments has seen extremely high responses rates.  This is mainly due to the fact that social networking is about sharing yourself, and your opinions and ideas with others, and what better way to do that but with quizzes and surveys.

To that effect, customized social networks have now started to emerge and are gaining traction with a wide variety of subjects, including market research.  Sodahead.com for instance, offers users a distinctive peer-to-peer question/opinion platform that is currently being utilized by more than 2 million unique visitors per month. 

Web 2.0 has the potential to provide better, more truthful, market research than traditional forms of market research and can ultimately guide markets to much more insightful information about their product or brand…why not give it a try!