Are Social Networking Personas Useful as Market Research Data?

CHALLENGE:
Marketers are increasingly using behavioral targeting and harvesting information on individuals found on the internet, such as Facebook and MySpace. But are social media participants creating false personas in cyberspace and are marketers creating invalid strategies due to their reliance on these data? Are marketers basing strategies on imagined personas? A study comparing Facebook personas with their real-world authors found a strong correlation between impressions created by personas and their real-world counterparts. Personas who were liked, were also liked in the real-world.

HOW THEY RESEARCHED IT:
Professors at the psychology department of Tufts University conducted the study comparing Facebook personas to real-life counterparts using 37 undergraduate volunteers. Undergrads were individually paired with one of six confederates in a four-minute “get-to-know-you” meeting. The confederates rated the undergraduate subjects on a number of dimensions related to likability. Undergraduates from another university viewed videos of the meetings and coded specific cues about the subjects’, non-verbal expressivity. Undergraduate subjects’ Facebook page was accessed by the researchers with the permission of the undergraduate subjects. Undergrads from a private university then rated the undergraduate subjects based on his or her Facebook page in terms of likability, and these ratings were combined to reveal a final “Facebook liking” score.

WHAT HAPPENED?:
Results from the survey indicate that impressions made through social media are similar to those attained through real-life interaction. The correlation between confederate liking and Facebook liking was statistically significant, and males and females were perceived similarly across all variables. Positive first impressions based on Facebook correlate to increased webpage expressivity and likewise positive first impression based on dynamic behavior correlate to increased non-verbal expressivity. In accordance with previous research the study finds no evidence of a linear relationship between self-disclosure and impressions of liking with relation to face-to-face interaction or personal web pages respectively. Other concluding evidence finds that online behavior is similar to that of personal interaction, for example people who disclose personal information and are expressive in face-to-face interactions tend to display the same traits on web pages. An interesting caveat of the study is that self-disclosure and expressivity are unrelated to one another, both online and in dynamic interactions. Overall concluding evidence shows that while there is some divergence between online and real-life personas, for the most part the two are very highly correlated.

WHY MANAGERS SHOULD CARE:
Marketers in today’s technologically driven business environment rely increasingly heavily on social media to provide a glimpse of what consumers want. The issue of whether or not social media accurately portrays consumer personalities is therefore an important concern for anyone using the Web to glean information about the consumer market. For marketers this study reveals positive news: searching Facebook sites is not for nothing. Nearly all Gen Y consumers update information on at least one social networking site, and older consumers are increasingly joining the trend. A high correlation between real-life and online personalities means that marketers can use the social networking sites to gather lifestyle information from consumers who may otherwise be unwilling to share, or instead of using costly and time consuming methods primary data collection methods. Social networking sites should not be the sole source of consumer research as there is some differential between dynamic interaction and online personas.
CAN YOU HELP?
Comment back by sharing how you have implemented data gained from social networking sites to improve marketing and promotional strategies. Does this study make you feel like you can rely on Facebook profiles or do you think more research is needed before you will rely on social website data? If you have been relying on social website profiles, have these profiles been efficacious?

From Max Weisbuch, Zorana Ivcevic, and Nalini Ambady “On being liked on the web and in the ‘‘real world”: Consistency in first impressions across personal webpages and spontaneous behavior,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (2009) 573–576