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Viewpoint: Facebook: the future of networking with customers Ray Poynter Clients want consumer insights to answer business needs. For many years the pursuit of insight has meant writing a research brief, appointing an agency, which would then recruit a sample, conduct interviews and analyses, and, after a period of time, present the distilled findings. Online interviewing has made this intermediated research process quicker (within fewer weeks) and cheaper (costing fewer thousands of dollars), but has changed it very little. Could all of this now be changing? Facebook has attracted millions of ordinary people to social networking and claims to be offering new solutions to old problems. One way that Facebook is challenging traditional research is via Facebook Polling, a new way to find out quick answers to simple questions. Users can create a question, specify a sample size, pay as little as US$51 (for 100 interviews) and have the results appear in their Facebook account a few hours later. These polls are clearly not going to replace conventional research projects, but they could spawn new ways of working. Traditional research is based on a paradigm where everything is designed before the research begins; something that often means the research struggles to fit with the realities of customers’ views and experiences. However, with Facebook Polling, the first step could be to spend US$200–300 asking a series of questions over two to three days, refining the scope of the problem, and answering some queries on the way. Research purists are going to highlight concerns about representivity, sampling methodology and validity, but with falling response rates and the increase in the use of panels, we can no longer assume conventional research meets any of these criteria. However, at Facebook’s prices and speed, there is plenty of chance to explore the medium, to estimate offsets and create benchmarks. Polling, however, is the least of the ways in which Facebook is challenging the way that brands communicate with, and learn from, their customers. One method of leveraging Facebook is to create a group, with links to conventional online surveys hosted outside Facebook. This approach is being used, for example, by Skittles Bubble Gum, with a group of over 5000 Facebook members. The group provides fun, news, games and links to surveys. Brands are increasingly realising they need to engage in a discourse with customers and in particular listen to their views. One way that some brands are doing this is via Facebook. Recently, Cadbury did just that when 93 Facebook groups, with upwards of 14,000 members between them, petitioned for Wispa (a bar discontinued in 2003) to be relaunched. Cadbury listened to their views nd relaunched the product in late 2007. In a Web 2.0 world, brands have to learn to ‘cede control to customers’, as A.G. Lafley, P&G’s CEO said (Lafley 2006). Cadbury has shown this with Wispa, and Facebook users are learning they can make a difference. Facebook will not replace conventional market research overnight; it will not be the medium for U&As, adtrackers, or customer satisfaction. But Facebook does illustrate that the model of how brands and customers communicate is changing. In the future, insight is less likely to be produced by large-scale, uniformly applied, structured survey instruments, and it is more likely to be acquired through purposeful discourse, and social networks could well be the medium. References
International Journal of Market Research 50(1), 2008
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