You remember focus groups right? Those little sessions that felt like group therapy…except for the brand. I’ve done many a focus group when I was younger, heck it was great to receive $50-$75 for an hour of my time. I also liked getting to see private sneak previews of new movies or products. Focus groups usually cost thousands of dollars to put on and there is a lot of work involved to find the right people through pre-screening processes.
A lot of brands out there are interested in what their users have to say and these same brands are also starting to acknowledge the value of social media tools such as twitter. So, could twitter make money from focus groups? The data is certainly there and I think it would be rather easy to set up.
- brand approaches twitter and says we need 20 males between the ages of 20-25 that like video games
- twitter creates a profile account that announces the focus groups and the qualifications
- people that match the qualifications follow the focus group twitter account
- once 20 qualified followers are confirmed they can go into a private conversation
- focus group is over, data is collected, brand pays twitter, twitter pays participants
Would there be some work required on the twitter back end to filter data and qualify users? Sure, but probably not much. Twitter has a lot of data that it collects from it’s users; of course the users don’t want the data sold to any third parties, but what if there was a data opt-in model along with a revenue share model? Of course, the focus groups is just one idea, I’m sure you could come up with many others.
Your thoughts?
Comments