Jason Falls argues that most marketers make decisions on assumptions rather than data. He introduces conversation research as a deeper form of social listening that can reveal what people actually say about your brand, not just what metrics show.
Chapters
Thank you, Trent. How's everybody doing? First session after lunch. Wake your ass up. Let's go. I wish, I wish I was given one of those, like, you know, motivational speeches. I would be really good at this point in time in the day because I'm loud, I'm obnoxious. As you can tell, I'm from South Boston, so that works well. Actually, I'm from Louisville, Kentucky, and down in Kentucky, hacking the conversation would be a completely different talk in that neck of the woods. But we're going to talk about conversation research, which is what I like to call sort of a new level of social listening, social monitoring. We'll get into all that in just a second, but to start us off, I want to welcome you to the Orange Crab of death. I really regret eating seafood yesterday. Walked in, I was a little nervous about this stage, but this is great. Hope you guys are having a great conference. Inbound's a lot of fun, and I've been honored to speak here a couple times. Really enjoy it. So what I want you to do is think of a marketing decision that you have made in the last 30, 60 days. Just get something in your mind. Doesn't have to be a major decision, just some marketing decision that you've made in the last 30 to 60 days. Once you have that clear in your mind, then I want you to think of the insight or piece of data that helped you make that decision. Now, there's a pretty good chance that you probably had a pretty easy time coming up with the thing, the decision that you made. Because you make decisions every day, it would have been easy to say, oh, you know, we decided to take out ads in this channel, we decided to change the content and the copy over here, we decided to go after a new sub audience in our target set, etc. But when you were asked, what piece of data, what piece of information led you to make that decision, there's a really good chance that most of the people in this room went, oh. Why is that? Because we make a lot of assumptions as marketers. We assume we know our target audience. We assume we know our brand. We assume we understand our competitors and the landscape that happens out there in the social media space. We don't back up those assumptions very often with data. Now, some of us work at companies and brands that are big enough, that have pockets, that are deep enough to go out and do consumer research and do profiling and focus groups and surveys and understand our target audiences really, really well.
