A couple of months ago at SXSW, we launched our first infographic, What Women Want, which analyzed the top 10 things men and women say “I want” in social media. The results were interesting; including a 70% overlap between the sexes and 80% of the list was food. After we finished the analysis, I started to wonder – what would men and women say if we went ahead and asked them what they want? So that is what we did. In attempt to parity the “sample”, we fielded a Harris survey of 1000 men and 1000 women, ages 18-65 with a simple question – “what do you want right now?” The results were interesting – a completely different top 10 list, this time with 60% overlap and 50% of the list was money related.
Then I realized something – when people are talking spontaneously in social media and you “Listen” to them, the results are more “emotional” and when you survey people, they stop and think so the results are more “logical”. It then occurred to me that a winning formula is to find an emotional insight in social, then survey to get the details. And that is what we did with the number one “want” women and men expressed in social media. You can find the second installment of the infographic on Mashable - and below.
So without further ado, here is What Women Want: Part II:
Lisa Joy Rosner
The Brand Passion Index, other cool ConsumerBase insights, and thoughts on understanding the social media universe from Lisa Joy Rosner, NetBase CMO.
This infographic is a prime example of how not to go about trying to interpret data. (a) These sorts of methodological differences are not new. They’ve been true of methodological differences forever. So the fact of such differences is not a headline. (b) Why is ice cream emotional and health for loved ones logical? This is classic misreading of data. (c) Money could well be number one, but people just don’t talk about it. So the fact that “listening” doesn’t pick it up is an indictment of listening – social media miss what’s really important because what’s really important isn’t something people talk about. (d) The notion of these two methodologies working together is certainly correct. But you don’t automatically get “insights” from social media that you then flesh out with survey data. In fact, the “focused study of groups,” i.e., focus groups, was invented by Robert Merton to do the exact opposite – get insights from surveys, then flesh them out with focus groups. Using something utterly qualitative and unscientific like “listening” to draw a definitive conclusion is completely wrong. (e) Instead, what you do is what Merton taught and what researchers still do. You work with “middle-level” theories. Not going to go off on that tangent. It’s in every intro methodology textbook. My only point is that a little grounding in some research basics could keep you from posting something like this.