In his recent blog post, Tom Anderson commented about the trends that the market research industry would witness in the coming year. One of the trend that he talks about is the effectiveness of research. He points out that research can be called effective when it significantly drives bottom line results. In one of my earlier posts titled “Real time updates: Companies want to know now!”, I highlighted the value of real time updates that will help companies analyze data at a faster speed. With a constant flow of data, companies can take decisions quickly that would impact the bottom line of the business.

So how far have we reached? As per the “New Gen Market Research” Group MR trends survey, the top 3 answers for “new analytical techniques” that companies want to use were,

• Blog mining
• Social Network Analysis
• Screen/Web Scraping

Research companies and buyers (corporates) around the globe are looking towards the web, more so towards social media to dig and search for fruitful spurts of information and data. Effective as it may sound, there are still industry leaders around the world who do not feel the immediate need to invest in social media activities. As per a survey conducted by Econsultancy, one third of the businesses are still reluctant to infuse their company to social media activities. As per the research their concern is not associated with cost but with what will they get in return and when. If we look in terms of cost, social media activities would be quite cheaper as compared to traditional advertising and direct mail techniques. However companies should realize that the primary benefit of tapping into social media is about brand building and establishing relationship with your consumers and prospective masses with an indirect impact on the revenues benefits.

Tracking consumers though social media will impact the company’s bottom line in the long run, however its all about understanding the immediate need and requirement of your target audience. So in times of recession, how does a company decide what to go for? A short term solution that will help them save costs or a long term investment to build brand and gain customer loyalty which will eventually lead to recurring revenues.