Web 2.0, social networks and the future of market research

Market Research is often accused of failing to provide the insights sought by our clients, and in an increasingly complex society we are challenged to embrace a different model of thinking with different principles at its centre. We believe that a Web 2.0 research platform and a social network approach offers marketing research new tools to meet the challenges of the future. The paper identifies a number of trends that may well provide fertile ground for marketing researchers to develop new approaches. The open source movement will not only affect the way that we think but the very methodologies that we use. The emergence of Web 2.0 offers us an array of collaborative tools with which to develop new research approaches to explore the rapidly changing social and media environment. At the same, the rapid growth of online social networks has fuelled the already rich research literature on the importance of studying humankind in 'tribes' or 'groups'. We argue that the combination of social computing tools and an understanding of social networks will allow us to build new types of research communities, in which respondents interact not only with the researchers but with the clients and most fertilely with each other. Moreover as we examine these types of networks we will become increasingly better able to handle multiple sources of data, and be as comfortable with these new forms of user generated content as we are with the traditional data collection tools of the last fifty years. We believe that these social software tools and trends provide the blueprint for researchers to build new types of 'participatory panels' or 'research communities' and we describe our experiences in developing such a community.