Tag Archives: Shop Talk
Anca Micheti | Critical Mass Calgary
Cultural theorists, from Michael Foucault to Judith Butler, have said it a long time ago: identity is not fixed and determined by demographics, but fluid and multifaceted. It is, to a certain extent, what we want it to be. It is a performance we put on for the world.
Social media makes this identity performance easier than ever. With more than 400 million active Facebook users and 73.5 million visitors to Twitter each month, it has allowed us to become content producers and consequently public performers of our identities. Every digital imprint we leave on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr, every blog post, review or tag is an opportunity for identity play. And who’s to say that each and all of these performances are not “the real me,” even if they’re not necessarily consistent with each other, and maybe each paints only a partial picture of who I “really” am. (more…)
Anastasia’s post on June 9 (probably unwittingly) hit on a topic close to my heart. (Anastasia, the cheque’s in the mail.)
I lead a consumer research group at Critical Mass called Curious that develops cost-effective and time-effective (but still effective) methods of getting to insight to ensure we’re making relevant and meaningful decisions. One of our methods involves the use of MROCs (market research online communities), which Brad Bortner from Forrester Research has written about over the past year. As you might imagine, I’m all about the use of communities specifically for this purpose. But unlike Anastasia’s post, Curious works to bring the conversation to the brand (in a more controlled environment) rather than monitoring the other conversations that are going on.
Great things can happen when you bring people together. We look for those moments when one of our respondents raises an interesting issue in one of our topics and suddenly the community is ablaze with activity around that topic. It’s something that I personally think of as an extraordinary experience.
One of our communities, ShopTalk, is comprised of a few hundred consumers in the US that have all been screened along various criteria (demographic, attitudinal, behavioral). We have discussions with them every week on topics ranging from buying toothpaste, to how they would define a term like “craftsmanship,” to whether they think the needs of moms are addressed online.
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