To Understand Consumer Data, Forget The Number-Crunchers And Focus On Qualitative Listening

The beauty of listening to social-media chatter is that one picture or one comment can have an outsized impact on your consumer knowledge and, as a consequence, your profitability. Unfortunately, corporate social-listening efforts are typically driven by econometricians, computer scientists, and IT technicians boil the data down to percentages, treating random comments (and pictures) as noise.

If you want meaning, you have to think like an anthropologist. You have to understand that social-listening data is inherently qualitative. That means learning to appreciate the value of the stray remark and synthesizing bits of information into a higher-order sense of what’s going on. That’s how you make the most of social media as a tool for peering inside people’s lives as they’re being lived and discovering what consumers are really thinking and doing.

Source: To Understand Consumer Data, Think Like an Anthropologist - Susan Fournier , and Bob Rietveld - Harvard Business Review

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