Twitterize Your Market Research

// January 12th, 2009 // Journal

Best Buy’s CMO, Barry Judge (@BestBuyCMO) has reached out to Twitter users to get a quick assessment of his new ad spots.

twitbestbuy

Should this replace the formal ad testing that most companies perform? Of course not.

But it will give Barry a pretty good estimate of what’s good and bad.  If a specific ad gets a brutal response from the Twitterverse (ugh, that’s a bad term. I promise to come up with something better) then he could save some research dough by trashing it early.

Use all the information you have available to you – especially if it can be obtained quickly and cheaply.

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  • Barry Judge
    It's input. For me it's a great platform to reach Best Buy blue shirts and corporate employees who may never know the rationale for our communication and may never see it. We still rely on copy testing as well, a blog supplements the more traditional feedback mechanisms.
  • Mike
    Hey Brian,

    He doesn't guarantee a balanced sampling blend and he doesn't use this by itself to make a true prediction.

    Understand what Twitter is and understand the information that is gathered. You're right, he'll hear about the extremes - either the people that hate it or the people that love it. And that is useful.

    It's not scientific and it shouldn't be used as a replacement for science. But at the cost of the time it takes to type 140 characters, would you not be interested to get a quick assessment of your product - even if it isn't weighted perfectly?
  • Brian LoCicero
    Okay, so you're a sampling guy, tell me how he guarantees a balanced sample in order to make a true prediction?

    Although I'll generalize greatly here, won't responses from Twitter be likened to what too many companies get from Customer Sat from recruiting off of register receipts? You'll either get the extremely happy with the service, always say yes group or the group just looking to trash the hell out of it because they're the "man".

    Also, by what standard does he evaluate this batch of ads versus any of his previous batches? He's evaluating ads in a cloud while flying with a blindfold on.

    I guess if I'm his current copy test MR firm, I'm worried, if I'm not, well, he's getting a call from me to explain the error of his ways. His polling practice is no better than (R.I.P.) Facebook Polls or some horrible poll on the nightly news. He's getting WoM but nothing statistically significant.
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