We all already know how powerful social media is. Day after day it pops out the next YouTube star or tips a whole country into revolution. Today it’s about to eliminate the market researcher …
News: Unless your living under a rock light years from earth, you know that Twitter has turned into the “news authority”. SO MUCH that it foretells the weather to the stock market better then the organizations that specialize in it! Twitter is also a cheaper solution then paying thousands a dollars for access to a database of all the news online. AND tweets are still more accurate in their facts then the controlled news, magazines and tv coverage, once you get past all the spam tweets.
Colors: Did you know that every year a group of people get together and decide which colors are going to be trendy for the year? 100 and so years later their are more then a million groups worldwide that do the same and claim to being THE official authority on color. Who would be more official then the buyers themselves. From Social media sites dedicated only to color to being able to search google images by color these self claimed authorities on color will have to find a new job.
Trends: Can you say keyword. Tumblr, Pinterest and Polyvore are all image based social media sites dedicated to what ever you want to dedicated your online image search or image taking too. The difference is: Polyvore you are limited to what fashion items the site can sell to you but you do make impressive “creative boards”, Pinterest you create list of interest and tumblr… well you can put up or tumble anything….but all searchable and quantifiable.
Ideas: Now I’m going to sound old…. back in my day there were “think tanks”, organizations that conduct research and engage in advocacy in areas of social policy, political strategy, economics, military, and technology issues. Today there is crowdsourcing, an open call that gathers those who are most fit to perform tasks, solve complex problems and contribute with the most relevant and fresh ideas…. People use to get paid for this. They still are however more and more companies from CocoCola to Google are going towards creating crowdsourcing campaigns because its cheaper, its good publicity and there are a lot of amazing intelligent people out their with great ideas.
So where does that leave the market researcher? One word, EVOLVE. It use to be that people changed careers ONCE in their lifetime. Today by the age of 30 the average person has changed careers twice but more importantly careers themselves are changing! Time is moving quickly and changing everything quickly, so rather then get hit by the wave of change, go get your boogie board and ride it till the next wave!