You know when you're sitting in a room, how the feeling in the room can quickly shift one way or another based on people's body language, comments or tone of voice? The same thing can happen in your focus group or forum (even if it's being held over the phone or online). I'm sure you've felt it before, in fact, sitting in a meeting today I experienced several severe swings - and no one was even talking. Silence can have the same impact.
This can have big impacts on your research - whether it's market research, a customer advisory panel or a town hall meeting. I don't want to launch into some long drawn out thing about why you should conduct surveys instead of these other methods, because I believe both research methods have a place in an organization (and even within a project). I do want to stress that because of various factors impacting discussions, it's important to have a surveying aspect as part of the project. Qualitative research methods can give skewed data very quickly just because of what one person says or does, and that's small point compared to how unrepresentative most research can be or the added social desirability bias.
A good example of this is pretty much any PR fiasco happening in social media or any FAIL hashtag. A couple months ago I posted about how conversations in social media isn't necessarily representative of your target population after Lightspeed Research found most moms were not negatively impacted by the Motrin Mom commercial. A few mommy bloggers took offense to the ad and blogged about it. It spread quickly and before you knew what everyone was pointing and saying FAIL about the entire conversation had changed.
Lots of people think of focus groups as conversations that happen in person or over the phone. But in today's new world, that's not always the case. You have the opportunity to monitor conversations surrounding your market, competitors, your product, etc., but that doesn't mean you should act just based on what you hear. One person can quickly swing the conversation in an entirely new direction just because they disagree with something. The only unfortunate part about the quick spread of information online is before you have a chance to stop it everyone has formed an opinion about something they have never even heard of. For this reason, I think its important to keep surveys in your back pocket when you need data to make business decisions.
Where have you see instances of results being skewed because of a shift in the room's atmosphere or an online discussion?
This can have big impacts on your research - whether it's market research, a customer advisory panel or a town hall meeting. I don't want to launch into some long drawn out thing about why you should conduct surveys instead of these other methods, because I believe both research methods have a place in an organization (and even within a project). I do want to stress that because of various factors impacting discussions, it's important to have a surveying aspect as part of the project. Qualitative research methods can give skewed data very quickly just because of what one person says or does, and that's small point compared to how unrepresentative most research can be or the added social desirability bias.
A good example of this is pretty much any PR fiasco happening in social media or any FAIL hashtag. A couple months ago I posted about how conversations in social media isn't necessarily representative of your target population after Lightspeed Research found most moms were not negatively impacted by the Motrin Mom commercial. A few mommy bloggers took offense to the ad and blogged about it. It spread quickly and before you knew what everyone was pointing and saying FAIL about the entire conversation had changed.
Lots of people think of focus groups as conversations that happen in person or over the phone. But in today's new world, that's not always the case. You have the opportunity to monitor conversations surrounding your market, competitors, your product, etc., but that doesn't mean you should act just based on what you hear. One person can quickly swing the conversation in an entirely new direction just because they disagree with something. The only unfortunate part about the quick spread of information online is before you have a chance to stop it everyone has formed an opinion about something they have never even heard of. For this reason, I think its important to keep surveys in your back pocket when you need data to make business decisions.
Where have you see instances of results being skewed because of a shift in the room's atmosphere or an online discussion?
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