New Media/New Research?

I have just returned from The Market Research Event, held this year in Las Vegas, where I gave a keynote address full of my usual equal measures of hope and doom.

As always, I learn far more from attending events like this than I imagine I share in return.

From the workshop presentations I dropped in on, I discovered that market researchers are as inspired and confused about the consequences of the new Social Media on their work as futurists are.

The Manoa School for many years has used a formula for identifying trends and emerging issues that Graham Molitor published in the mid 1970s.

That was a pre-Social Media era, to say the least.

Molitor correctly said at the time that emerging issues (future problem/opportunities just barely popping into view) can be found only in extremely obscure and often unsavory places. It takes a lot of rooting around to find them. Once they emerge, if they survive at all, they then go through a series of predictable processes of growth from emergence, to take off, to becoming a raging trend, to becoming an all-apparent problem/opportunity, and then either persisting as such, or dying, or cycling down only to emerge at some later point in time.

Using Molitor's scheme, we at the Manoa School prided ourselves on developing good scanners who produced useful emerging issues before many other futurists did.

It turns out that market researchers are short-run futurists of a particular kind: they are trying to discover what new products customers will buy and consumers use, and they are interested in discovering what customers and consumers think about new products.

Surely, then, the new Social Media are a gold mine for both futurists and market researchers.

Indeed, they would seem to be a market researchers dream come true: millions of people very willingly trying out new products and expressing their opinions about them and everything else. All that valuable information just hanging out there for anyone to see. No need to go to the difficult process of identifying and interviewing random samples, or assembling focus groups, or using other traditional survey research methods. Instead, with blogs, et al, getting opinions is like shooting fish in a barrel, right?

On the Internet, and specifically on blogs, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the like, everyone is eagerly revealing their innermost thoughts (and bodies) for anyone who wants to read, hear or look.

Hoo Ha!

But that is just the problem: everyone is online expressing a million opinions in a million different places. Holy Infoglut!

Well, how about surfing the blogs of blogs or the other many services telling you (for a price, and with proprietary software that may or may not exist) what the blogs are saying?

But are complainers more like to speak out than praisers, or those who are neutral?

It also turns out that an unknown number of bloggers are being paid to say they like (or dislike) a product (or a candidate, or a policy), seriously skewing the results.

And then there are the "everyones" who are NOT online but who still are customers and consumers. Are their opinions similar or different from the ones online?

And so on.

So market researchers are in a quandary, trying to figure out how to use the goldmine to find gold and not gigantic amounts of dross.

We futurists are in the same situation as we look for true emerging issues.

Any suggestions as to a solution?

Especially since yesterday's hottest thing--say, My Space--becomes passé before many people even learn how to use it, and there is no reason to assume YouTube, or Facebook (especially), or even Google (currently proclaimed the Emperor--often without clothes, but still the Emperor--by several market researches) will be The Next Thing next year.  The learning curve is so great and the half-life of The Next Thing is so short, that many appear to be giving up and going back to watching TV.

Leaving the truly weird and out-of-it crying away in lonely cyberspace.

Ah!  Just the place to find Molitor's old emerging issues!

Jim Dator