Ed Farrell, director of Consumer Reports’ (CR) national research center, delivered one of the opening keynotes at the MRA/Quirk’s/CEB Corporate Researchers Conference in September. In a wide-ranging talk, one of his main areas of focus was on how his organization perceives user-generated content as a threat. That surprised the heck out of me but, on reflection, I guess it shouldn’t have. As a longtime Consumer Reports devotee, I hold it as the gold standard of product reviews and information and would never consider some fellow consumer’s review on Amazon.com or Facebook to be even remotely equal in weight or relevance to me. But despite the high levels of trust that CR has earned, it’s now got a lot of competition in the product-recommendation arena from consumers posting product reviews and recommendations on blogs, search engines, Amazon, Facebook – the list is almost endless.
Farrell said CR is doing a lot of work looking at the user-generated reviews and comments across the Web, trying to get a handle on the data by potentially structuring and validating it and, in the process, figuring out the best ways to use it.
Beyond determining how to defend against or benefit from the user-generated data, CR appears to have a robust appetite for most traditional forms of marketing research. Farrell said his group surveys two million consumers per year via mail, Web and other methods. He’s also a huge fan of usability research.
Like many of his peers, Farrell is grappling with the onslaught of social media-generated data and what it means for researchers and their place within their organizations. The role of the researcher has never been so muddled and undefined as it is now, he said. But while social media data is causing headaches, we can’t shy away from it or reject it because it’s not gathered in a rigorous, standardized manner. Don’t get so mired in process, Farrell said, that you overlook the potential value of what you’re reading and hearing from the users who generate all that content.