In Rob Wilson’s piece on the benefits of pretesting, he shows us that by gaining consumer insight through focus groups pre-campaign, brands are able to create engaging, relevant activity that taps into a consumer need, instigating brand behaviour to fulfil it. This is all very well for pretesting, but is the same market research as effective for post-campaign measurement? How can market research, post-event, tell us how engaged consumers were during the height of a campaign? This is where social media comes in. With its real-time feedback and ability to have constant streams of conversation, social media is arguably more effective when it comes to capturing exactly how consumers felt right in the moment of engagement than a survey taken a few days later or even a few hours later.Arguably then, market research is decontextualised, and as a result brands should always look to incorporate social media into their campaigns for this very reason. Despite what some may think, this doesn’t have to be a complicated process. Brands should always create a hashtag on Twitter for each event, which would help raise the profile of a campaign by drawing all conversation into one place. The hashtag also makes it easy to track and monitor from an evaluation point of view, and it encourages people to keep referring back to your event after it has finished. Facebook is also useful for gauging real-time feedback. Creating a bespoke Facebook page for an event/campaign and encouraging users to upload photos or comments is a great way to track what they really think, right when it matters the most.
Listening to people in social media works because the comments or feedback are made at the moment of high engagement. What you learn from this kind of medium cannot be gathered through research.
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