by Ben Leet, Sales Director, uSamp

Last week, while travelling home from work, a trivial tweet of mine was retweeted by a complete stranger. My initial reaction was one of annoyance; I didn’t really want complete strangers knowing that I was frustrated by my train service that day. But then I started to question myself… why had I put a hashtag into the tweet citing the train company by name if I didn’t want it to be found in the Twittersphere?

What even compelled me to tweet in the first place? Sure I was frustrated at the delays, and the probable untruths that were being used as explanations for these delays, but did that tweet improve the situation? And more importantly, did it make me feel better that I’d voiced my anger directly at the train company, who may or may not be paying attention to the random rant of a customer on Twitter?

Hashtags are incredible things. For those not familiar with Twitter, they are a simple and very effective way of filtering the noise on a microblog. Hashtags enable users to search for a term or phrase within the Twittersphere. In essense, the hash sign connects the dots between incongruous conversations, and unites strangers seeking the same information. It’s a very powerful tool that can be used in a variety of ways depending on the context, but is most often used to promote and re-cycle news around the world quicker than news networks, and, as a result of this collective sharing of knowledge, hashtags become a measure of “trending” or popular topics. This article for example may find itself on Twitter with a #mrx hashtag to allow people looking for Market Research tweets to find it more easily (for the top MR influencers, check out Research Magazine's Infographic).

A platform like Twitter has obvious MR appeal. It only makes sense that an industry, which thrives on mapping and analyzing consumer insight, should harness this power. By listening to these conversations, and tracking hashtags of brands, services or anything else that we need to measure, it’s a simple but very effective source of MR data that the industry is now trying to come to terms with.

“Social media monitoring” is a buzzword for 2012, not just around Twitter of course but across the wider spectrum of social media, where people’s views and opinions are aired in the public domain, freely accessible for companies that know where and how to decipher the dialogue circulating about their brands. However, I have a fundamental concern over using this methodology in isolation, and I’ll reference my own experience – people tend to write comments, posts, blogs or tweet most often when they are unhappy with something. In other words, rant.

Of course there are exceptions to this: influencers tend to be very vocal with both positive and negative commentary. However most comment sites and social media outlets are used by consumers to vent frustration, or to provide a sense of moral duty -- warning our peers that a product or service isn’t what we expected. Twitter and other social media networks increasingly enable this vicious circle of negative commentary, and it is hard make out valuable insight without taking into consideration the amplification of a rant.

I am the perfect example of the importance of evaluating the context of a tweet. Generally speaking I’m very happy with my train company. It almost always runs trains on time; it fulfills a service that I cannot get anywhere else, and it allows me to do my job in central London whilst living just outside London. If I received a market research survey about this company, my balanced view in the cold light of day would be very different than my rush-hour rant.

What does this mean for the #mrx industry? Listening is an incredibly powerful tool, but used in isolation it can distort the true reality of any given situation. For me, a perfect world is a blend of listening and asking, where we as an industry are capturing the value of social media monitoring, but having the countermeasure of survey deployment in place to create a three-dimensional view of what’s really happening. We have to hear what’s being said in a natural environment, and social media is an obvious place to do this, but we also have to go and discover the opinions that are not being openly shared. Only then can we understand the dichotomy between the public and private persona; and in my case, decode my bi-polar attitude toward a train company.

How do you use the hashtag? Do you think Market Researchers can find analytical value in it?