Sometime back when a telecom company approached us to conduct an Online Market Survey to identify the reasons why people would change their service provider when number portability is available, we thought of running a PPC campaign for the same. We found the method to be a bit expensive and people might not be interested in clicking on the link thereby we might not get the number of responses we were looking at.

The best answer we got was a simple three letter buzz word SNS. It was cheap, it was accurate and at the same time personal. Since then we have conducted one day surveys for a restaurant in Mumbai, an HR consultancy and all with good results and happy customers. Oh and by the way we received a hundred responses for our telecom survey in 3 days flat and that too without any operational cost, of course we passed on this benefit to our client.

Until two years back I used to think (and most of us still think) that Google is a search engine, but then I realized there was much more to it. Today I know that Google, apart from giving us excellent products like Gmail, Adwords, Adsense, Picasa and Google Analytics and some not so great products like Wave and Buzz, is actually a Marketing Research (MR) and Advertising company. But I can very clearly see Google’s market share decreasing rapidly, even as a search engine.

Social Media has made MR very easy and advertising almost free and personal. If you want to buy a new camera you can ask people on Twitter, there are many experts out there who happily give you genuine first hand user reviews rather than searching on Google and reading some paid reviews of products. If you want to watch a movie you just have to tweet the name and people will let you know how it is. So if you want an opinion you can easily get hundreds in under 140 characters each. Yeah it’s a bit confusing at times but still its better than reading a 1000 word document. Sometimes people provide you with links to the article it works like a refined search engine, you don’t have to wad through millions of pages that Google throws up.

So are Social Networking Sites the new face of MR, I would say no. The new face of MR is the mobile phone. It can be a bit on the expensive side but if you add an incentive for the respondent you can receive thousands of accurate responses for your products instantly, which more than makes up for the expense. And with GPRS becoming cheaper by the KB, the revolution is waiting to happen, as the cliché goes ‘the future IS mobile’.

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