Social Networks and the Ah Ha moment - from Serendipity to systematic research

Remember your first focus group. I'll admit that my memory is a bit fuzzy. I think it was sometime in 1985 when I was working at Foote, Cone, and Belding, an advertising agency. We were listening to people discuss laundry detergent, looking for that "Ah ha" insight that would help us reposition Dynamo and make it relevant again. As the respondents gave their feedback on different positioning concepts (recommended by DuPont as effective at preventing future stains!), we sat in the back room eating M&M's and hoping for that great quote, that key moment when someone said just the right thing for us to move forward with advertising.

Now 25 years and literally hundreds of focus groups later, it all seems so quaint in the world of digital social networking. Thanks to Facebook, Twitter, Survey Monkey, and a host of other tools, we no longer have to rely on the serendipity of catching an individual respondent at just the right moment. You can survey virtually all of your customers, or at least the ones that matter most, and get their insights in a systematic way through sentiment analysis or harvesting verbatim comments and organizing them by keywords. The biggest challenge is no longer collecting - every customer comment about your brand or product is captured digitally for all eternity. The challenge now is sorting. At 1800flowers.com, we did bi-weekly customer surveys with thousands of respondents, and the challenge was always how to review the answers to open ended questions. Like Google, algorithms are being developed to sort, parse, and refine the customer comments, like panning for gold in a stream. These algorithms can help provide a ranking system to be used systemically for product positioning, new product development, loyalty building programs, and improvements in customer experience. Qualitative has become Quantitative, and as a result we now have "Ah ha" moments to choose from as long as we are willing to invest the resources to find them.