Random Thoughts
May 30, 2023
It was two weeks ago when I attended a sit-in class for the University of Chicago Booth School Executive MBA program (and yes, I am actually exploring that to enrich myself), and coincidentally, the class was all about end-user research—although the quantitative side. The professor suggested nonchalantly that online social media chat rooms are good avenues to gather end-user intelligence. Being a long-time qualitative researcher, such suggestion of course piques my interest.
So the following week or so, I decided to embark on an experiment to gauge just how effective social media platforms are in gathering end-user intelligence. And this is what I did:
Craft beer as the topic: Since I am also the co-founder of a Hong Kong craft beer brand, to me, craft beer is the natural focus of this experiment. Plus, I always wanted to know just how effective a craft beer brand strategy would be if it only focuses on one single beer style—hazy—succeed (if you look around, most, if not all, craft beer brands offer a wide range of style, and none really just focus on one style).
Social media platforms with large beer-drinking communities are chosen as the testing grounds:Reddit (r/CraftBeer group = 109K members), Facebook (Craft Beer Lovers Singapore = 3K members), and even LinkedIn (Beer Industry Members = 49K members).
A range of questions were posted--from simple behavioral, preference, to concept testing—to truly gauge the extent of the effectiveness of social media platforms as an intelligence-gathering tool.
These are samples of the actual discussions that happened:
So what is my verdict on this?
Well, to begin with, we cannot be tempted to think of it in absolute terms, that is, it is either effective or not effective at all. To me, all things have a role to play in this world, and social media platforms as intelligence-gathering tools are the same. We just need to figure out when and what topic to use it for that makes it most effective.
With that said, here are the conclusions that I have come to terms with through this little experiment:
Social media platforms are great for understanding simple end-user preferences, attitudes, expectations, and behaviours; especially when you already have a good level of market knowledge and you just need a few key information points to fill the gap. In this case, we did a simple poll and received more than enough statistically significant sample size to be confident of the end result. But understand that if you know very little about the market or end-users you are trying to target, you will need professionally conducted research, and social media platforms just not going to give you all the answers you need.
Social media platforms can also be a great vehicle to test business/product/service concepts at their very initial stage. This is the stage when you just came up with the idea and you just need to bounce the idea off of a fairly realistic end-user pool to determine the viability of the concept and to optimize it. But for late stage concept development, you will still need professional research agency’s help as you will need to be confident of the opinions being realistic to market (ultimately you do not know who those people are and where they are from that are giving you opinions, especially with Reddit like platforms that users are mostly anonymous).
Finally, I want to also give you a few things to bear in mind when using social media platforms as an end-user intelligence-gathering tool:
Responses are mostly going to come within the first 24-48 hours and after that, the chat thread usually dies off. So, make sure you put your efforts to moderate the chat during those few key hours to get as much responses as you can.
Craft your questions carefully, because if you present something that is questionable, you risk inviting negative comments that are going to kill the discussion itself. And this is likely going to extend to your account as users going to remember your user name and might not respond to you in subsequent discussion threads that you start.
Well, that’s it for this week. As usual, I hope this helps you in some way, but feel free to comment and let me know your thoughts. As always, follow us on our LinkedIn page for more!
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