Ideal Business Consultants

You are in for a treat today! Today, one of our good friends at Survey Monkey, Phillip Garland, Ph.D., VP of Methodology is guest blogging at BookFresh on the hot topic of survey research on the web. Survey Monkey is a revolutionary questionnaire tool to create and publish custom surveys in minutes, and then view results graphically and in real time.

Is the Web Killing Survey Research?

By Philip Garland, Ph.D., VP, Methodology, SurveyMonkey

A growing number of researchers are becoming enamored with opinion hubs afforded by the Internet—facebook, twitter, blogs, and proprietary user communities, to name a few. These researchers may be distracted by flashes in a pan.

Questions about “Web 2.0 methods” are seemingly more often of the “how?” variety, rather than “why?” let alone the “are you sure?” type. In short, it seems that “old timer” researchers are excited to play with a new toy without first determining whether it is safe to do so.

Web 2.0 Methods of Gathering Information

Managers now seek to listen to their respective customers. Put bluntly in the words of Kantar Group’s Kim Dedeker: “survey research is dead” (ARF Conference, October 2008). Instead, firms have been seeking new, “Web 2.0,” methods of gathering information from people. The new methods are largely focused on online communities, social networking, blogging, and content creation.

The purported benefits of these new methods are the opportunity to collect feedback; 1) in “real time” that is 2) rich and robust. Firms increasingly want to know what people are thinking about their products as they experience them or, at least, while it is on their mind at a given moment. The idea is that feedback about a product is most reliable and valid when it is offered to the firm right away.

In addition, companies apparently want to be able to get feedback in whatever way people are willing to give it, rather than simply “confining” opinions within a survey question. Some believe that people ought to be able to make up their own topics for discussion as the firm passively observes. Even better, they argue, is when many customers are online discussing the product with one another. The results of such cultivations of opinion in Web 2.0 domains seem to be collected and digested by a single researcher at the firm. This person then generates reports about business strategy based on little more than extrapolations from individual opinion. Furthermore, these are often opinions of a loud minority.

This has real (and even immediate) consequences for classic survey businesses. If firms are emboldened enough by web methods to abandon classic survey research, what do we make of the practice? Survey researchers do have an abundance of talent surrounding how to analyze data in ways that tells stories about people.

Is It Enough?

A fundamental shortcoming of relying too heavily on Web 2.0 methodology is that the measures are ultimately taken from people who are of a certain type. That is, measuring opinion from customers in Web 2.0 space inevitably means that those people are 1) existing customers and 2) high-use early adopters (both of technology and the firm’s product). By definition, the mode by which firms desire to collect information does not include low use/occasional customers and people outside of a firm’s market share and thus collecting opinion from these people. These firms will sorely miss the opinions of the vast majority of people who are not early technology adopters and fiercely loyal consumers of their products. Their “loyal customer” databases are simply inadequate for solving a good deal of their marketing questions.

Essentially, by relying on Web 2.0 users, the “coverage” of the populations is incomplete and people that are covered in Web 2.0 space now might, over time, change into a different Internet demographic. For example, what happens when early adopter teenage view of MTV product ‘A’ develops into a 30-year-old internet “old hand” interested in CBS product ‘B’? Both networks are owned by Viacom, but will Viacom be able to find them as they age and change their media habits (including their perceived utility of the Internet) and stick with them across opinion modes? More importantly, what does Viacom know about them when they were 14 that makes a difference when they are 30? This presents an unprecedented opportunity to conceptualize sample as a living, breathing, phenomenon rather than a dip of a thermometer.

If it is the mode of communication that advertisers and marketers are all excited about, fine—but we need to remind them that the medium is not the message. In our co-authored book chapter in Society Online on the uses of new media, David Silver and I show that people use the Internet for increased efficiency in accomplishing old tasks—not for doing entirely new things. The history of new media from the printing press, through radio, and television, and now the Internet corroborates these findings. So let’s not jump on the bandwagon, instead let’s drive it.

Thanks for the great info, Philip. Be sure to check out Survey Monkey for some great questionnaire tools.

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