“If you’ve ever wished you had the budget for a focus group, now you do. All that’s required is reaching out to a couple of key individuals and asking them if they would be interested in testing your product or process and letting you know what they think, or posting about it, if they like.Blogs in particular and social media in general can offer incredible insight for a relatively small investment (your time is another matter!). When I speak to clients about investigating a corporate blogging strategy, I often refer to it as “low cost market research”, something I’m sure we’d all like to see a little more of!”

(Source)

The above quote from Dina Mehta’s Blog, reminds me of a conversation I had with the rep from a major “go-fast boat” manufacturer. At a recent boat show I was able to listen to him engage boat lovers as they toured the various models, ending each conversation with this question: “Where do you get most of your boating news?”

Later on I asked what his informal survey was about. Bottom line, as a result of making these queries for the past few years at boat shows across the country, his company had found that an increasingly large percentage of the boating community sought out boating info on the internet. And not primarily from retail or manufacturer sites but from message boards set up by boaters for boaters.

In the past year, one of his dealers had launched a blog that included videos of these go-fast boats being put through the paces on the local lake. This manufacturer had found the conversations on these entries worth more than “a years worth of boat show feedback at a fraction of the price”. Not that blogs will ever replace boat shows, but the quality of the feedback and customer interaction so impressed this manufacturer that they now participate in a dealer’s costs to build a website that incorporates social networking technology.

Boaters are an example of a consumer group that have evolved naturally into social communities that center around their passion. Boat dealers are learning to tap into these natural communities by giving them a port of call online.

Tags: business-blogging, focus_group, market_research, weblogs

This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 3:37 am and is filed under Business Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.