Viewpoint: The importance of blogging

Mike Cooke
Global Director, Online CoE, at GfK NOP

So you know that blogs are the fastest growing media on the planet. You know that 70 million blogs exist and that over 75,000 new ones are created each day. But have you given any consideration to the notion that they might just be the tip of one of the most disruptive technological icebergs that our industry has faced in its relatively short history?

Blogging challenges the concept of privacy, one of the historic pillars on which the market research industry has been founded, and by which it has so often sought to differentiate itself from other marketing activity. Blogging highlights the current Web 2.0 focus of the rational exchange of information for the mutual benefit of researcher and respondent. We all know that our respondents increasingly do not trust us to protect their data and respect their privacy. Indeed the evidence is that they expect us to utilise it for our benefit or why, in a world founded on the exchange of goods and services for mutual profit, would we bother to collect it at all?

Yet while our response rates have been falling, Web 2.0 services, exemplified by blogging, have grown with alacrity. In the new world of Web 2.0, one begins to question the traditional, hierarchical research model based on the behaviourist traditions of the 1960s, that still underpins so much of our thinking, and starts to wonder whether it should be replaced by the notion of marketing information and insights being co-created by our research partners (‘respondents’ in the old hierarchical model). The challenge is equally relevant for marketing and advertising. If brands are the most important aspect of marketing, then the key Web 2.0 question becomes ‘Who owns the brand?’ Control of brand messages and the creation of desired brand equity are less easily maintained by the nominal brand owner in a world where a brand’s credibility is conferred from the bottom up rather than from the top down.

In a research world based on a knowledge co-creation model, the ‘data subject’ (currently the ‘subjected respondent’) is treated with respect and given equal weight to the researcher. How often does that happen today, as evidenced by our structured questionnaires?

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, calls this the shift from ‘lectures to conversations’ and believes that it is a healthy evolution for media. One wonders whether the research industry has realised the importance of the democratisation of the means of production, and the liberalisation of distribution that is taking place. If we did, as Anderson highlighted for the media world, we might start to figure out how best to gather consumer insight in this new economy.

When one sees the pop star Lily Allen as an example of the power of blogs on the front page of the Sunday Times Business Section, it is time we woke up as an industry and realised that the world has changed and that we need to question our behaviourally influenced research models. We should ‘Smile’ to see her first single charting at number one – Lily had 140,152 ‘friends’ on MySpace.com before its release. We should recognise that, just like the loss of the boyfriend in her song, there is no turning back because the new world of social networks and social computing requires a new response from the market research community. Our world must change to reflect the changing environment in which we live and which we seek to measure.

We have wonderful new opportunities ahead of us. Social networks allow us to interact with co-creators and produce new insights. Community sites and blogs are not just media phenomena. They are new research modalities that can be utilised to measure and understand complex consumer decision making, especially in those areas, such as finance, where the decision to purchase, say, a mortgage may be taken over a long period of time and where the actual decision might be made for less than rational reasons. As journals or diaries to record the consumer journey, blogs can be very powerful.

At the heart of blogging is the notion that the person is not a ‘respondent’ reacting to our stimulus, but rather a willing participant on a journey of discovery. It is a mutually beneficial exchange of their insights for our creation of a record of their journey. In this new world, market research will find it increasingly hard to divorce itself from the consumer decision making process if it is to be relevant. We will increasingly need to see ourselves as part of the conversation rather than as measurers of the shadows on Plato’s cave.

If we rise to the challenge, Web 2.0 gives us a new window into the consumer mindset: how consumers ‘tag’ their photos on Flickr.com; what videos they post on YouTube.com; their favourite websites on del.icio.us; what content they choose to post and rate on digg.com, or how they describe themselves and their favourite things in their MySpace profile. This new type of data allows us to go beyond the traditional models created using group discussions and cluster analysis, and look at the ways that the population is building its own world and how it is referencing it via the ‘folksonamy’ that it is using, rather than through our labels. This new window is the dataset of a ‘virtual ethnography’ waiting for us to tap into it. These are exciting new opportunities that are as potentially rewarding as the emergence of the brand planner’s role in the 1970s. Like that revolution, the opportunities of Web 2.0 are about putting the individual at the centre of our research.

This new world is defined by the concept of ‘engagement’ but this has not been the strength of market researchers in the past. In the future we had better learn to engage with the population, and begin to co-create data, so that we can add the consumer insights that our clients want, or we may become ‘blogging irrelevant’.

International Journal of Market Research 48(6), 2006

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