Social media to replace research surveys?

Will social media replace surveys as a research tool? Joan Lewis, global consumer and market knowledge officer of Proctor & Gamble Co thinks so.

Speaking at the Advertising Research Foundation’s Re:Think 2011 event in New York, Lewis said the industry needs to get away from “believing a method, particularly survey research, will be the solution to anything. We need to be methodology agnostic”.

Lewis said social media has changed the way consumers interact and engage around the world, and as such, they will be less likely to get involved in structured research.

“We are all brought into the research industry with the almost dogmatic belief that representation is everything,” Lewis said, although she doesn’t discount the importance of having samples representative of a population for some research.

“But we need to get away from the notion that being representative of something is the only way to learn. I still hear people say – ‘that social-media thing, that’s not really going to pan out’. We will learn enormously whether [social-media samples are] representative or not.”

Read the full Advertising Age article here.