In catching up on market research reading, we stumbled on this little gem from Question Science Blogspot. In this article, Jon Puleston tells us about some surprising statistics he overheard while attending the ESOMAR 3D conference at the end of 2012:
350 out of 36,000—Porsche culled through 36,000 social media responses and found that only 350 were “useful”. Significantly, all of the comments were processed manually. This suggests that deciphering data from social media could be a poor investment. So, can text analytics software accurately decipher social media comments, and are the comments even worth deciphering? Clearly, this is going to vary by topic, brand in question and scope. Some brands/keywords get a lot more “garbage” than others. What we have found here at Research Rockstar is that you have to do some serious testing of your topic/brand name/keywords of interest before you invest significantly in social media analysis.
240 hours— The amount of time spent by a market research firm analyzing text from 1000 Facebook users.
.18—A survey by Jannie Hofmyer and Alice Louw from market research company TNS, showed a surprising lack of correlation between “aided awareness of a brand & purchase activity”. Their research revealed that surveys are routinely constructed incorrectly and contain questions that are incapable of measuring behavior. Customers and non-customers of products should take different surveys to create relevant survey data results.
50%— Peit Hein van Dam, from digital tracking company Wakoopa, tracked a 50% variation between the claimed readership level of a Dutch newspaper and the readership level tracked on mobile devices and computers. “Cookie” tracking proves to be largely inaccurate in counting unique visitors and web traffic.
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