RSS
Home
Fun with focus groups (part 1)
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
I recently spent some time helping to moderate focus groups for one of our clients. Market Lodge is an application (currently on Facebook, soon to be on others) that allows users, or Keepers, to create storefronts right on their profile pages. They can choose from tens of thousands of products that they have, or recommend, or want, feature them in their Market Lodges, and earn 10% whenever someone makes a purchase.
We took on the parent company, bSocial Networks, as a client, because I could see Market Lodge as having the potential to be the holy grail of social network monetization - everyone benefits - from social network users, to vendors, to social networks as entities.
So spending hours with the target demo (Millennials - who, along with Gen-Xers are a WideFoc.us specialty) was truly thought-provoking. Granted, the sample size is small, but my instinct tells me that most of the sentiments we picked up are valid.
Here are our first four key insights:
1. We’re seeing a slight but pronounced behavior and motivation differences between students and young professionals. Students (and recent students) and Millennials who are establishing themselves in the workplace use social networks in different ways, with different goals. More on that someday soon.
2. The drift from MySpace to Facebook is real. Everyone we spoke with spends most (if not all of) of his or her social networking time on Facebook. The few who had MySpace pages said they hadn’t visited them in weeks or months. LinkedIn is on the rise among young professionals.
3. Millennials are sensitive to purchase recommendations from their friends, but still make their own decisions based on pricing and perceived value. And the friend making the recommendation must be perceived as truly qualified. If you don’t know crap about speakers, your friends aren’t going to act on your recommendation about those woofers you picked up.
4. Application fatigue is very real. Zombies? Vampires? Sick of them. New applications must be useful and interesting, and have a very clear value prop to have any sort of longevity. Many group members had removed all but the most basic of apps - that’s left are the tools that allow them to share their personalities and predilections with minimal fuss (good news for our client). Getting their attention about a new app is another story altogether.
Looking back at these first four thoughts, I admit they’re pretty obvious. And insight doesn’t = execution success. Still, it’s good to know you know stuff.
Related Articles:
Comments
