Found this blog by Matt Heinz about building a successful business to business social media strategy
yesterday. Good and very clear and to be frank I have seen plenty more like it. And I keep reading them because I need the repetition to get the new ideas in and to stop old thinking popping up again. What Matt is talking about is customer acquisition and to an extent customer relationship management (CRM) if you incline to put that under a separate heading. What in last week's conference was called building an outbound community. Whether this is appropriate for building an inbound or listening community isn't so clear. Because customer acquisition is built on exchange - you're not doing this for free and they wouldn't tolerate you being there unless they got something out of it and were interested enough in the product in the first place. Neither is necessarily true for the researcher.
Which suggests to me that researchers are going to become a lot more like stalkers - with all the perils associated with this - including it being against every code of research practice I have ever seen. Or they go out and construct gated communities which they find some way to incentivise and claim these are somehow more 'authentic' than the kind they construct in viewing facilities and using push style face to face telephone and email surveys.
The alternative is that they join the customer hunters and go out and build relationships in a way that is altogether more grey. Its questionable whether this would be research at all - more like one to one customer profiling. Where research skills still come to the fore.
You'll forgive me then for decorating this post with images from Uboat movies, indians stalking buffalo and the redoubtable David Attenborough pointing a lens at every species entertaining enough to be worth our attention. Because all of these are hunters. Separate from what they are hunting. Artifice is intrinsic to what they do to get close enough to their prey. You may want to rule this out of court for research but I am starting to think the unthinkable. I don't intend to take money off my research subjects on false pretenses. But at the outset I can't reveal my true colours because it would change the way people behave. Better to approach quietly to learn, ask questions and engage - and finally to reveal my agenda. Which is after all at heart curiosity. And then to continue with a reciprocal relationship as transparent as is possible. None of that wham bam back to the analysis stage Ma'am.
Researchers don't like the idea of being hunters. But we had better get used to the idea. Because the best have already started.
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