Someone from Australia left a comment in response to one of my recent posts, asking if I had contact information for a former Millward Brown employee.  I did happen to have the information, so from my seat in the United States, I was able to help someone in Australia connect with someone in China.  I thought of “six degrees of separation,” the theory that any two people in the world can be connected through a chain of acquaintances with only six links.  Since two people had just been connected through me – just one single link – I wondered if the internet had made the world even smaller.

According to Wikipedia, the theory of six degrees of separation was first proposed in 1929 by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy.  It was tested and confirmed experimentally in 1967 by American psychologist Stanley Milgram, and again in 2001, by Columbia University Professor Duncan Watts.

Since 2001, however, worldwide penetration of the Internet has increased dramatically, leading to the proliferation of millions of blogs and other forms of consumer generated media.  So has the World Wide Web reduced the number of degrees of separation?

Or do coincidences simply happen?  Twenty years ago I happened upon two old university friends in Crete at dawn, at the top of the Samaria Gorge, and just a couple of weeks ago I bumped into a colleague while in transit at Heathrow Airport.  Maybe the odds are such that we shouldn’t be surprised to occasionally encounter a familiar face in an unexpected place.  But the fact that a blog post helped people re-connect across continents does highlight the power of consumer generated media to create connections.  Many people, including Max Kalehoff, who writes for the MediaPost blog OnlineSpin, go a step further, asserting that consumer generated media is a powerful force for marketing and market research. Max recently published a new piece titled, “Is there really something wrong with cgm research?”  In this post, he contests a number of comments made by Bill Neal, the co-founder of SDR consulting and a recognized authority on market research.  In the course of an interview with Toby Bloomberg, Bill discounted consumer generated media as a source of reliable information. 

Affirming the value of CGM research, Max declares, “CGM research firms are analyzing billions of public discussions to deliver a wide range of quantitative and qualitative research applicable in nearly every marketing situation. These measurements go far beyond product mentions and brand hits, and do dive deep into sophisticated consumer segmentation and insights, social influence mapping, and media measurements.” Countering Bill’s contention that the sample is undoubtedly biased, Max explains that this population of “hand-raisers” is valuable precisely because it is represents not the masses but the vocal minority.

This argument reminds me of a discussion I had a while back with the creators of Firefly, an online collaborative filter. The system recommended music to site visitors, based on matching their stated preferences to those of other people who had entered ratings for the same artists and bands. It was essentially an on-the-fly clustering of ratings. My argument was that the filtering was flawed because the ratings tended to be come from people in their twenties.  When someone older (such as myself), entered ratings, the recommendations were all over the board, because people with similar tastes were not adequately represented. I recommended that they seed the site with a representative cross-section of ratings in order to better calibrate the system for everyone.

That never happened, but now I believe that we have a similar issue with the analysis of blogs. The output can be incredibly valuable, but there is no escaping the fact that the conclusions drawn are likely to be based on the views of the vocal minority. They may resonate with the wider population, but they may not.  As I highlighted in my post “Do you trust me? A poll says the chances are fifty-fifty,” our evidence is that very few people reference or trust informal online sources of information like blogs, making it even more important that conclusions drawn for these informal sources are checked against a more representative population..

Max makes some very credible points, and I am certainly not suggesting that the analysis of consumer generated media is a waste of time. It is, however, potentially misleading, unless you have a proper frame of reference or the experience to parse through the garbage to find the insights.

Max said one thing with which I absolutely agree:  “The problem with marketing today is that it too often constricts itself to the average, where findings are diluted, insightful nuances ignored and early indicators forgotten.” It reminds me of one of my favorite sayings, which is: “The problem with research is that, while it is usually right, it can, on occasion, be specifically wrong.” I’d say that comment could be applied more frequently to research based solely on data from cgm.  What do you think?
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