One of the first things you learn about market research is there are two main categories – quantitative and qualitative, i.e., the numbers and the words. Market Research 101 teachers around the world drill the differences into their students and advocate the use of both to get a complete picture of the market being studied.
However, in "Getting a Signed Estimate 101," we all learned that clients aren't big fans of paying to ask the same question two different ways. Combining a quantitative and qualitative study for the best of both worlds is every client's dream. Questions like, "Why can't we have open-ended questions on that survey going to 4,000 people?" or "Can't we draw some conclusions on market size from the focus groups?" send shivers down the spine of every Research 101 alum. But it's just a cold, hard business reality that having the budget and the time to run parallel quantitative and qualitative studies will be the exception rather than the rule.
What's a modern, resourceful market researcher to do? How about turning to a source of qualitative data that's unfiltered, direct from the consumer's mind and relatively easy to acquire? That's what more and more researchers are doing as they mine social media for qualitative insights to supplement their quantitative studies.
The Nielsen Company and Procter & Gamble even recently investigated the types of data that quantitative studies and so called "listening" studies (which includes mining social media sources, as well as customer relations or other available customer data) resulted in. They found listening activities gave a more complete picture of customers’ motivations and enabled connections to be made between issues that otherwise would not have been linked.
Capitalizing on the readily available source of qualitative data in social media just makes sense. Capturing the nuances of a market that otherwise would have gone unseen in a quantitative-only study could earn you an "A" in "Signed Estimates 101" as well as "Successful and Happy Clients 401."