A Sociological Change is Coming
Posted by Dean Wiltse on Mon, Apr 07, 2008
I just attended and spoke at the ARF conference in New York. It was a truly great meeting and it was personally very invigorating and validating to what we are doing at Vovici.
On the first day we heard presentations about political polling and social trend shifts. The internet and social networks are changing politics in the US dramatically. I was amazed to hear that more people have seen the Obama speech about race on YouTube than have seen his minister's preaching on television news.
In the second day we heard from the four CEO's of the largest research firms, all of whom I have met several times during my years at Greenfield Online. The conversation was mostly about online data quality and the issues faced by the largest MR firms in the world. Very interesting. Once again the prominent topic was the internet.
At lunch on the second day the CEO from Digitas spoke about online marketing and the emergence of social networks and the opportunity for brand marketing and research through internet channels. He gave some more mind boggling statistics;
- In 2009 over 1.5 billion people will be online worldwide
- One third of the worldwide population has high speed internet access
- One half of the world's population will own a cell phone
- The top five sites with the most traffic include three social networks, MySpace, YouTube and Facebook. Google and Yahoo were one and two.
His speech was before my breakout session. I began my session talking about this data and these trends and how they support the opportunity that we bring to business... to build online communities of their customers to gather feedback and to do better research.
A sociological change is happening. People are interacting on the internet by reading blogs, posting reviews and joining forums. Our technology platform takes advantage of these trends to help companies by building community panels of prospects and customers to take surveys and give feedback. My session went well. At the end, senior managers of four major brands approached me, gave me their business card and said, "call me, we want one of those".