The question posed to the group of 5 Bloggers this month was: “Qualitative Research: How has the art of listening changed, and what can we do to leverage new listening tools in a Social Media landscape.”

Links to my fellow bloggers Annie Pettit, Joel Rubinson, Josh Mendelsohn and Brandon Bertelsen can be found below.

An impetus for the selection of this topic was an as-usually well written post by Joel Rubinson on “Transforming Research Through Listening”.

“Listening for the unexpected should be at the heart of the innovation process.  It takes research from the back end and places it squarely at the front end.  It says our role doesn’t kick in only when the marketing team is ready to “order up” a concept test, a commercial test, etc.  Our role is to anticipate the next move of consumers and to help the marketing teams turn that into innovation (Joel Rubinson, Dec 11/09)

There is an oft-cited stat that “80% of usable business information originates in an unstructured form” (Source: Merrill Lynch). Whether there is support of not for this figure, the art of listening has evolved by giving structure, to the unstructured.

I believe there are 2 areas where Market Research solutions will, and must rapidly evolve in the next 12-24 months:

“Mobile Listening”; location based social networks like Brightkite, GyPSii, Pelago and Loopt will generate over $3.0 billion of revenue by 2013. The tie-in between these services, and the evolution of listening should be of great interest to researchers.

Mobile Ethnography, and other evolved forms of Qualitative Research have been empowered by such mobile platforms. While these options by no means replace traditional Qualitative solutions, the expanded toolkit offers us an unparalleled perspective at the consumer “moment of truth”, and unlocking real-time motivations for purchase decisions will significantly enhance the value and visibility of Market Research within the client organization.

“Social Media Listening”; there are no shortage of listening solutions available to marketers, and I was intrugued by a blog from last year which asked: “How valuable are qualitative and personal focus groups compared to online sentiment analysis”?  The notion that these are potentially swappable methodologies raises a pile of issues and flags, but does point to the practical reality that the lines between options continue to blur. Those trained in the art of listening, are now able to mine through thousands of Qualitative comments, to help build the brand story, and glean tremendously valuable insights.

Aggregated metrics like sentiment analysis are interesting, in the way that a Net Promoter score is interesting – it is easy to explain, and can be trended over time. Yet, on its’ own, the metric offers only part of the brand story. Those who capture the online, volunteered conversations through the new paradigm lens of survey research will help their clients uncover incredibly valuable learnings about topics we haven’t asked about in our traditional survey methods.

New and exciting insights will come from going deeper, exploring the moment of truth, and structuring those unstructured Qualitative conversations.

More to come from element54 on both these topics, and please visit my fellow bloggers and their perspectives on this issue.

• Annie Petit, Chief Research Officer at Conversition: post coming shortly at http://lovestats.wordpress.com/
• Brandon Bertelsen: post coming shortly at  http://www.bertelsen.ca/
• Josh Mendelsohn, VP Marketing at Chadwick Martin Bailey: post coming shortly at  http://blog.cmbinfo.com/bid/36062/1-Topic-5-Blogs-Qualitative-Market-Research-in-2012
• Joel Rubinson, Chief Research Officer at The ARF: post coming shortly at http://blog.joelrubinson.net/