I get a lot of Twitter-followers, based on keywords like, eh, ‘Screenplay’ and ‘Consulting,’ and it annoying to say the least. Why? Because I don’t believe in mass-networking and I will explain why in the rest of this post (there are other reasons, this was just the trigger).

Over the years, I’ve accumulated a lot of experience in market research and I’ve become pretty good at it. From selling myself over the phone in a minute or less, to overcoming gatekeepers, to learning to really listen to people, to arranging personal interviews and transcribing the results, to designing and co-ordinating mass-research campaigns, and analysing them, I feel I’ve seen a lot and I’ve also seen a lot bad practices.

Why does market research get a bad rap? Because a lot of it focusses on getting as many results in as possible. It’s called “statistical significance,” for the newcomers to this field, and it means that getting the answers of 10 people is less subjective than getting the answers of 2. Of course you have to take into account that there are different types of market research: those that lead to clear outcomes and those that lead to lot’s of data that can be analysed and interpreted. Being a practical guy, I much prefer the first as the other kind often feels like a waste of money to me.

How do you design an outcome-focussed research campaign? Pretty simple: you get as close as possible to the outcome and you test it. In tech-world, this would be developing a prototype and testing it. In web-world, this would be something like A/B-marketing, where you design different versions of the same page and test their effectiveness on different samples. Of course, you can conduct plenty of market research before also, but as a favourite lecturer of mine once told me: “how do you research innovation (i.e. something new)? You can’t, because people really don’t know how they feel once the innovation is there.”

The other kind of market research, the one that produces a lot of data, is a gold-mine for journalists, analysts, and consultants. They all love to deal with abstractions that can be applied to many different situations. “Research showed that people are getting tired of green advertising. Therefore, we can write an article/report/advice to our clients that green advertising sucks.” The end, pay me.

That is not to say that more results does not provide a more unbiased perspective on a problem, but it’s just not as simple as asking a lot of people the same questions. There are ways around that, such as collecting demographic and psychographic data and I don’t want to cheapen that. I’ve written before about how statistics only matter as much as where your data comes from. But I’ve also written that triangulation is a large part of my research philosophy, which means getting different perspectives on the same issue. Yes, kind of like A/B marketing. So, I do desk-research, I do web-based surveys, I do interviews with consumers and experts. All of which provides me with a more objective view of the solution to a problem.

Networking, and now we come to the gist of it, is also a philosophy with different flavours. One, the Twitter-kind, focusses on buzz-words, reciprocity (I follow you, you follow me), and the masses. Facebook and LinkedIN are more about: so, how do you know this person? Similarly, in real life, business cards are the equivalent of Twitter: “I’m a consultant, here’s my card, can I have yours?” And friendships, both business and personal ones, are the ones that are about: “so, how do we know each other again?”

I have yet to get much value out of the web, so my cynical view on Twitter may be too cynical. I have also, as yet, received fairly little value from business cards, I should mention. I don’t go browsing through them and call people at random, same way I don’t twitter at random. Facebook is my number one web-tool, as I use it as a platform to do other things. Similarly, my friends in real life are an important platform for me also, to discuss ideas and hopefully build on those.

I think there is some kind of parallel between what I feel is effective market-research (many different perspectives, not quantity-, but quality-focussed) and networking (essentially the same). Arguably, my stance on networking may come from my own personal attitudes, I won’t deny it, but also because I believe, from my marketing background, that it just isn’t effective.

But this is just my opinion. What’s yours? Network in mass or Network in class?

Vincent

Related posts:

1. Networking: Weak ties, strong ties, and their implications
2. Why marketeers should STFU (pardon the French)
3. Theory: Why No One Cares about Video on the Internet
4. Join me on Blellow!
5. Beating the market-leader, PowerPoint?