Cathy Harrison (@VirtualMR) is the founder of the Market Research twitter group. In this interview, we talk about using Twibes and Twitter for Market Research. Also, we talk about a few ways she promotes the twibe, and possible improvements to Twibes.

Adam Loving:

Hi, Cathy. This is Adam from Twibes. How are you today?

Cathy:

Fine, Adam. And yourself?

Adam:

Pretty good, pretty good. Hopefully I got the timing right, and you’re expecting my call, I hope?

Cathy:

Absolutely.

Adam:

Great. I’ve just been talking to a few different Twibe founders, people who have these amazing Twibes. I’ve got Market Research up here, and it’s got 347 members. I just want to find out what people are…

Cathy:

Only a few more.

Adam:

I want to find out what you’re doing, if anything, to build the Twibe up. First of all, can you tell me a little bit about yourself?

Cathy:

Sure. I’ve been a market research professional for over 20 years now. Currently I’m supporting a new social media agency focused on marketing to women, and I also freelance for agencies, and vendors and clients specializing in marketing in social media.

Adam:

Quite a lot going on there.

Cathy:

Oh yeah.

Adam:

What kind of clients do you work with? Are you independent, or do you work for a company?

Cathy:

Currently I’m independent, but I’m supporting ShesConnected. That’s a social networking site for women, and it helps them manage both their personal and business social networking activities. They have a lot of bloggers there, and I can also manage Twitter and Facebook there, which is really handy.

Adam:

Got it. What sort of marketing activities, aside from tweeting all the time, which I see these here. What is the stuff that you do on a day-to-day basis?

Cathy:

I do both quantitative and qualitative research, so basically what I do is hear what a business problem is, and I translate it into a methodology. Then I may write a questionnaire or guide, and then field the research, and then analyze the results and present the results to the client.

Adam:

Fascinating. So you know you’ve succeeded when, what? There are more people on the website, more people participating? What are your metrics for a successful campaign?

Cathy:

In terms of social media and promoting myself?

Adam:

Right, yeah, or your clients, or any given project.

Cathy:

Well, it isn’t necessarily online, all my research. But what I do use social networking for is to actually get the freelance work – it’s been really useful that way – and just getting to know other research professionals. I learn a tremendous amount just reading links, interacting with people. It’s been amazing.

Adam:

Cool. OK. With regard to the Market Research Twibe, did you stumble into that, or was it a preconceived goal to collect these people? How did you get into it?

Cathy:

Actually, I sort of stumbled into it. I saw a tweet that there was this application called Twibes, so I went to it immediately and did a search on market research. I was amazed that there was nothing there on it, so I quickly developed one and started to promote it.

Adam:

Cool.

Cathy:

I wanted a central meeting place for market researchers.

Adam:

Right. So it’s for your peers more than anything else. When you say "promote it," does that mean tweeting about it? Obviously you’ve got a fair amount of followers already yourself.

Cathy:

There’s many different ways that I promote the Twibe. I posted a link on my LinkedIn profile page, and I frequently provide updates there on the growing number of members. I also posted a link on several LinkedIn market research group sites, but you really have to read the group rules before posting because some groups don’t allow that type of posting.
I also tweet from the Twibe page directly, which provides a link to the group. On my Twitter profile page, I also provide a link. Occasionally I will send out a tweet asking those who are interested in the art and science of market research to join the group.

Adam:

Right, right. Great. Have there been any specific new relationships or opportunities that have come out of this for you?

Cathy:

Yes. I do think some people know me first and then join the Twibe, but there’s been people that joined the Twibe directly, and then they follow me. So it has provided a new means of getting relationships with other market researchers.

Adam:

OK. How about your other Twitter tips and tricks in general? What tools do you use? How do you look at Twitter?

Cathy:

I am one of those Twitterholics. Truly, I think it’s a fabulous tool. It has a really bad rep that people don’t understand it, but to me it’s just a tremendous business tool about having an opportunity to meet a variety of knowledgeable people, interacting with them, reading what they read, hear what they’re thinking. It’s just amazing. I’ve gotten to know people from all over the world.
Primarily I tweet from my home office. I usually tweet directly on Twitter or using FriendFeed. But I also have a Twitter feed coming to the ShesConnected site, which I mentioned before, so I can manage both my Twitter and Facebook accounts there, which is very useful. On my BlackBerry, I use TwitterBerry.

Adam:

OK. Excellent. I brought up ShesConnected here on the website so I could take a look. All right. Last question or subject is what can Twibes do better, or Twitter in general, I suppose. What are some areas for improvement? What do you wish it did?

Cathy:

Well, it would be useful to have some increased functionality in terms of facilitating conversations. That would really help build the Twibe. Right now we rely on the hash tags, and not all the tweets that contain those hash tags appear on the Twibes still.
Also the delay in the tweet postings makes visiting the site less attractive for some than just doing a search on Twitter using the hash tags. So anything like live discussion groups would be useful, or actually streaming tweets with the hash tags almost as they happen.

I don’t know about the technology and what’s possible, what isn’t possible, but these things would help make the group more cohesive.

Adam:

Yeah, there’s some improvements that I’ve been planning for just making sure the tweets are more up to date and that I don’t miss any. When you say "conversation," that also interests me because that’s a frustration I have with Twitter in general. Does that mean maybe showing message threading perhaps? Or does that mean maybe better email notifications?

Cathy:

Actually, that would be useful. Having the message threading, that would be fabulous. I’m trying to think of where I saw that before.

Adam:

There’s a site called Tweetree that does a really good job of that. But, unfortunately, that’s all it does. So you just go and look at your tweet stream as a thread, and then you can’t really post to it as I remember it. Certainly I could do something like that on Twibes.
I’m also trying to fix up the notification email, which I realize is not terribly useful. It’ll give you a number of tweets, but I’d like that ideally to include the most recent tweets on a weekly or daily basis so that you can jump in right from your email and comment or not visit if nothing interesting is going on.

Cathy:

Yes.

Adam:

Because I know that’s useful say on Facebook or, for example, where every single reply that you get you get an email, and that triggers more replies.

Cathy:

The only thing to be careful on that is people just being overwhelmed with emails. I guess it would have to be something that they would opt into or not, I suppose. I just have trouble keeping up with my emails as it is.
I do check the Twibes I’d say at least once a day, but sometimes twice.

Adam:

Well, cool. Great. Great. All right. Well, I will let you go, but thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me.

Cathy:

You’re welcome.

Adam:

I’ll put this up on the blog for other people to listen to if, that’s all right.

Cathy:

Oh, sure that’s fine.

Adam:

With a link off to your site. I really appreciate it.

Cathy:

You’re welcome. Have a good day.

Adam:

You too. Talk to you later.

Cathy:

Bye.

Adam:

Bye.