The Social Media Revolution http://www.facebook.com/hashtag/#socialprofiling i4box

1. International Journal of Market Research Vol. 51 Issue 4
559
The social media revolution
Tom Smith
DOI: 10.2501/S1470785309200773
Over the last few years the web has fun-damentally
shifted towards user-driven
technologies such as blogs, social net-works
and video-sharing platforms.
Collectively these social technologies
have enabled a revolution in user-generated
content, global community
and the publishing of consumer opin-ion,
now uniformly tagged as social
media. This movement is dominating
the way we use the internet, and the
leading social platforms like Facebook,
MySpace, YouTube and now Twit-ter
have moved into the mainstream.
These sites are the tip of a redefinition
of how the internet works, with every
site now incorporating the features that
allow users to publish opinions, con-nect,
build community, or produce and
share content.
This growth of social access points
means that usage has grown at stag-gering
rates. The Universal McCann
tracker study I ran up until the end
of 2008, which measured the usage
of mainstream social platforms across
the world among 17,000 active web
users, demonstrated this. The number
of active users reading blogs grew
from 54% to 77% globally in just two
years, while the number who had writ-ten
a blog grew from 28% to 45%.
The other big change was the shift
to consumer-driven multimedia plat-forms
such as video sharing, with 83%
watching video clips online, up from
32% in 2006, making it the quickest-growing
platform in history.
What is interesting is the way this
changes our relationship to content
and information. This was shown in
the Global Web Index pilot study that
my company, Trendstream, delivered
in January, which demonstrated that
the video-sharing market in the US
is driven by consumer-focused con-tent.
Videos focused on users’ personal
lives outpaced all professional content
both in terms of passively viewing,
where 41% had watched videos of user
content­in
the last week, and also in the
videos that were shared and uploaded.
This focus on personal topics demon-strates
how the future of content will
be increasingly bottom up and con-sumer
driven.
This social revolution is being felt all
around us, even if you are not actively
involved in social media. Today if
you search for product, the results
are dominated by user content and
opinion – this shapes all online users’
opinions. Second, our networks of
influence are growing and becoming
more dominated by strangers as we
increasingly socialise in digital spaces
such as Facebook and Twitter, expos-ing
us constantly to a huge volume of
consumer influence. Third, the opin-ions
we find in the online space influ-ence
our opinions offline as well, as
they move into the traditional media.
This was recently demonstrated by the
Hudson River air crash in New York,
which was reported first and most
immediately via social channels such
as Twitter, and then made its way into
traditional media.
Social media impact is being felt
across the globe. Wherever people are
online they are actively engaged with a
wide variety of social media platforms,
from blogs to social networking to

2. Conference notes
video sharing – if there is an internet
connection, people are involved. How-ever,
560
Asian internet users lead the way
and are the most active users of blogs,
particularly in China and South Korea,
where blogs are adopted as a form of
social community. The next most active
users are in Latin America, while the
established web markets of the US
and Europe demonstrate slightly lower
levels of adoption, and a more pas-sive
approach to creating and sharing
content­.
This is changing, however,
and the ‘active participation rates’ are
increasing hugely.
Listening economy
Social media is reorientating the econ-omy.
The previous world of mass
communications was controlled by
the professionals, and feedback and
comment were virtually impossible to
project to the world. Organisations in
the public eye could operate with lit-tle
concern for their interaction with
consumers. Now that every consumer
online is a commentator, reviewer and
publisher, all organisations have to
stop talking and start listening to how
they are perceived. This makes the act
of listening an essential part of every
business model, feeding product devel-opment,
customer relations and mar-keting
communications. Companies
that don’t listen in this environment
will increasingly get left behind.
Of course, listening is just the start,
it is about actively taking part and
engaging consumers directly. You listen
and then you talk. This engagement
with consumers online will be a key
way to build long-term advocates of
the brand, who not only purchase their
products but also recommend them on
and offline. This orientation away from
talking though mass media to listening
and conversing through social media
shifts the whole focus of economy,
making research more important.
What the listening economy
means for research
This is a huge opportunity for research
as the need for research outputs and
knowledge drives the economy.
• Sharing opinions is normal: social
media have inspired an environment
where sharing opinions and content
through the web is fun, meaningful
and rewarding. This creates an envi-ronment
where conducting research
is more natural.
• Research sits at the top table: in
an economy driven by consumer
opinion, the need for research skills
becomes paramount, both to under-stand
the reasons behind trends in
opinion and also to create truly great
customer-centric products, which is
an absolute must in the ultra-trans-parent
world of consumer commen-tators.
• Research becomes marketing: it is
now possible to build a brand through
listening. The well-documented­examples
of MyStarbucksidea and
Dellideastorm show the potential to
drive brand advocacy on research.
Listening and asking questions in a
social media environment become
a way to start listening and build
relationships­.
• Global focus: users are sharing con-tent
and building community across
the world thanks to social platforms;
consequently, brands are increasingly
globally focused.

3. International Journal of Market Research Vol. 51 Issue 4
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• Social platforms become research
platforms: social networks such as
Facebook and LinkedIn are increas-ingly
focusing on the opportunities
to provide research services. Mass-market
communities have a huge
potential to develop research serv-ices.
This interest will only increase
as their pressure to turn a profit
increases in the current economic
environment.
• The rise of real data: as we publish
our opinions, we leave a trail of data.
These data are worth money, and
the rise of buzz tracking tools, which
track consumer opinion on the web,
and analytics to explain behaviour
become big business. There will,
however, be an increasing need to
put research behind this data to
understand why things happen.
Embracing the opportunities
Research and research companies can
embrace these opportunities by evolv-ing
in the following ways.
• Build community: to stay relevant
and drive engagement, research pan-els
should evolve into communities
by borrowing the best practices of
social networks. Consumers want to
share opinions, and research com-munities
should tap into that. This
means providing constant surveys,
message boards, listening perma-nently
rather than occasionally, and
making the conversation two-way by
sharing results back with them.
• Work with brands to build research
communities: creating two-way
research-led user portals will be
standard practice for all organisa-tions
in the public eye. Listening
and being open will be an essential
positioning in the future. Research
agencies can help companies deliver
this.
• Use external platforms to build com-munity:
talk to users and panellists
via blogs and social network pages,
and find them in the places where
they spend time.
• Widgitise: widgets, or mini applica-tions,
allow you to place your site
or content in an external web envi-ronment,
such as a social network
page, a personalised home page
such as iGoogle or the desktop (e.g.
Windows­Vista
Sidebar). These offer
a new way of, first, building and
maintaining research communities
and, second, distributing surveys­.
• Embrace social media platforms as
research platforms: blogs, wikis,
video sites and social networks all
offer interesting platforms for collect-ing
opinions, content and data. This
requires a longer-term and a some-times
‘always on’ approach rather
than short surveying windows.
Research companies that evolve with
the social media space and embrace
it in all these ways will increasingly
prosper. Remember, this is just the
start – as all content moves into the
web then social media and consumer
opinion will increasingly define the
future of not just the web, but society
as a whole.
Tom Smith is Founder and Managing
Director of Trendstream.