Blog surveys, e-mails, interactions on Facebook, and other forms of social media provide WONDERFUL ways to hold a conversation with your customers and to court potential customers.  In our opinion, EVERYONE in business should be implementing a social media strategy.

But social media and blogs can’t provide a systematic picture of your customer base or your target market.

Let’s think for a minute about who is most likely to post on your blog or fill out a survey there, to send an e-mail to you, to communicate with you on your Facebook group:  It’s typically the customers who are most motivated.

That means you’re most likely to hear from customers who feel strongly, one way or the other–often, customers who either love your products or hate them!  Clearly, that won’t provide a balanced view of what your customers think, as a whole.

It also won’t give you an accurate picture of who your customer are. We’ve talked about the importance of understanding your customers’ characteristics, because such traits as their age, their gender, their level of education, and their income have been shown to affect the kind of products and services they buy.

So let’s think about this issue for a minute, in relation to a blog survey or social media.  Here, too, you’re likely to get a very skewed picture if you rely solely on these methods of gathering information.

For example, although the age range of people who use social media is increasing dramatically, it’s still skewed toward younger users.  So you’re far less likely to hear from older custoners on a blog survey than you are to hear from your younger ones.

That means you can’t accurately estimate the age range of your customers from a blog survey.  But it also means much more than that.  It means that, if the views of older customers differ from those of their younger counterparts–as they do on most issues–you’re going to get a skewed picture of EVERY attitude and behavior you measure.

This illustration shows you, then, why blog surveys and other forms of social media are limited in their ability to give you accurate information about your customer base.

Should you do blog surveys?  Absolutely.  Poll widgets and other mechanisms for conducting surveys on your blog CAN tell you about what blog readers think (at least it tells you what the people who chose to respond think).  More importantly, it gives them a voice, another way to communicate with you.

The ideal strategy is to engage in an ongoing conversation with your customers through blog surveys, through other social media activities, AND through surveys.  Each of these elements provides a unique aspect of the ongoing communication with your market.

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