Brand-proprietary social networks offer incredible opportunities for companies to learn about their customers, as well as their brand, products and services. While site traffic usually provides valuable quantitative data, it tends to be limited on the qualitative side.

The combination of profile information and member-related site traffic goes far beyond and gets to a point where members can be compared to a massive in-house focus group. In addition, because the company doesn’t have to ask direct questions to clients (e.g. “what color do you like?”), the type of information gathered is far more relevant and valuable from an R&D perspective.

The first issue that usually comes to mind at that point is with regards to privacy. Senior executives like to ask the (smart) question: “will my clients be happy to know that I am gathering information about them?”.

This is a good and founded question but it is also a non-issue. What we are interested in here is not whether John Smith is thirty five, lives in New York, and works at a trading desk in Wall Street. What we want to know is far more interesting than John Smith’s personal life and it looks like this:

How many of our existing or potential clients who are:
- Thirty to forty years old
- Living in New York City
- Working in Wall Street
and…
- Are going to the Watch section of our forums
- At least two times a week
- And posts more than two comments a month?

You notice how:
1. Incredibly specific, relevant and valuable that information is for, say, a watch maker who is planning on opening a boutique Downtown New York City…
2. I am not mentioning John Smith’s name anywhere
3. Because I am not gathering specifically John Smith’s personal information, John doesn’t need to know about my query.

Now, that’s R&D.