Radium

Research fails to understand social media

Wednesday, 20th May , 2009

Earlier today, MediaPost presented a research study conducted by Knowledge Networks. The study focused on how people use social media and specifically how social media influences consumer purchase decisions. According to Knowledge Networks, the study was based on responses from 418 social media users. While the study raises some important topics, I take issue with several items in the report.

Dave Tice, vice president at Knowledge Networks was quoted

“Obviously, a lot of people are using social media, but they are not explicitly turning to it for marketing purposes, or for finding out what products to buy. It’s really about connecting with friends, or connecting with other people. What we’re seeing is that word-of-mouth is still the No. 1 most influential source, followed by TV. The influence of social media isn’t at the bottom of the list, but it is somewhere in the long tail of marketing – about the same as print ads, or online [display] ads.”

Taking this statement at face value, I would agree, most people are not logging into facebook to find out what car they should buy. However, I think the report is confusing social media for social networking. Social media is an online or mobile tool for sharing and discussing information and experiences with others whereas social networking is building and participating in digital communities of people that share interests.

I would bet the average person doesn’t understand what constitutes social media when posed in a research question. When asked “how often do they turn to social media for purchase decisions” they probably ask themselves if they ever explicitly go to facebook or MySpace to get purchase advice. The answer is probably not often.

But let’s play out some scenarios.

What if that person hops on IM and asks a friend, “what kind of X should I buy?” Does that constitute as a word of mouth reference or social media? What if they fire up Google and type in “best running shoes” and they click a blog post discussing performance running shoes. What gets credited as the influence, the search engine or the blog with 40 comments on the best running shoes? I could go on forever with examples, but the point I’m trying to make is that many people don’t understand the full influence social media has on their purchase decisions because they don’t fully understand what constitutes social media.

Social media is becoming the delivery method for word of mouth.

From reading this article, a couple of items become apparent. First, the line between word of mouth and social media is becoming blurred. Where does social media stop and word of mouth begin, if the majority of our daily interactions happen within the context of a social network does that change the definition of word of mouth?

Second, we need to mindful of the metrics we use to track social media marketing results. Social media isn’t just another tool you can pull off the shelf  when you want to “sell some more stuff”, it’s a different way of doing business and different way of presenting your business. You need to have the right metrics (and ask the right questions) when analyzing results.

Thirdly, I believe social media is still relatively young and many of the tools necessary to facilitate purchases and referral tracking are simply not in place (heck, facebook is still more than 7 months late on the launch of their payment platform). But over time this will change as platforms mature and more sites open up their API to third party developers. The ability for social media to directly influence a purchase should no doubt increase over time, but I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

What do you think?