It was time to bring the role of new media (Web 2.0, social networking for business) into my marketing research course material.

My Intelligent Marketing Research class, part of Georgetown University’s Center for Continuing and Professional Education Marketing Certification program, just ended.

Unlike some of the other courses in the program which deal with one aspect of marketing, such as learning to develop a marketing plan, this course covers a profession and it expertise. In fact, as the students can attest to, there’s too much data to absorb in the intensive five week (three-plus hours per class per week) course.

My challenge has been to cut out a lot of detail but retain enough information so that when students complete the course, they have more than a passing familiarity with quantitative and qualitative marketing research methods, know the challenges the industry faces, are better armed if they need to hire a research supplier, and get hands-on experience. Using the body of important information I’ve amassed and also assigning a practical book written in lay terminology has been overwhelming (textbook: Guerrilla Marketing Research: Marketing Research Techniques That Can Help Any Business Make More Money (Robert J. Kaden, author; Kogan Page, London and Philadelphia, publisher).  

Even so, the course needed to include newer techniques and resources for gathering and analyzing data. It took some research for me—using my networks on LinkedIn and others and searching out the best material available—to determine what to integrate with intelligent course content. Fortunately, the research aspect covered finding, observing and listening to the chatter, and then analyzing and learning from the vast amounts of online data—not using it for marketing activities. An assignment to explore information from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs and other online communities of interest dovetailed well with reading a series of articles, and new content has been successfully integrated into the syllabus.

Bringing this around to the entrepreneurial approach--before launching a new venture, it’s vitally important to learn as much as possible about the business environment, not just from a technological or economic perspective, but from clients, customers, prospects, competitors. And using text mining, web scraping and text extraction and coding, and text analytics is what’s needed. Feel free to let me know if you’d like me to point you to some interesting case studies and articles on the subject (pat@lovenhart.com). And, if you have any useful tips on this topic, please let readers know.