Why pay to get someone in?
Jinfo Blog

4th July 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Free versus fee is a debate that has been going on for years now. But harvesting free information requires do-it-yourself skills of no mean order. In any case, the pressure to squeeze maximum benefit out of free information may be easing. FreePint’s new report on Buying Patterns shows more than a third of survey respondents reporting stable budgets and 20% actually reporting some increases – a dramatic improvement on last year’s results (preview of main findings at http://www.freepint.com/go/b535952 – register to receive the free report at http://web.freepint.com/go/how/buying/). However, respondents also confirm that it can be notoriously difficult to demonstrate ‘measurable benefit’ from specific information products. So perhaps it’s easier to measure the benefits of ad hoc portfolios of information, gathered from multiple sources for the benefit of one specific project – and that’s where DIY comes in. A recent Outsell Insight (http://digbig.com/5bbwyr – available to Outsell clients only) took the debate from the Free to the DIY level. Leaving aside news gathering, it suggested, nowhere was use of DIY solutions more evident than in market research. But there were caveats. Users could easily get customer feedback via Twitter or Facebook – but the bigger challenge was in finding the right base of survey respondents to sample, especially in business-to-business. It’s an issue raised recently on LiveWire, where we mused on social networks’ apparent inability to guarantee a representative sample instead of just sheer scale (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29141). But when as impeccable an information business as the Financial Times decides to engage in crowd-sourced market research, then you do have to sit up and take notice. The FT has hired a company called Idea Bounty (http://www.ideabounty.com/) to help it find ways of increasing the number of subscriptions to FT.com. Instead of having just one creative team, this enables it to tap the brains of potentially thousands of creatives and only pay for the ideas it uses. Part of the rationale for using charged-for services like the FT, as opposed to DIY solutions, is the ability that professional journalists – or market researchers or credit rating agencies for that matter – offer of separating the genuinely valuable from the dross. Or do they? Information specialist Karen Blakeman recently gleefully blew the lid off a Daily Mail story that the iPhone 4 may be recalled. The story was in fact completely bogus, lifted uncritically from a Tweet that clearly described itself as ‘a parody account’ (http://digbig.com/5bbwys). Even if the offending journalist wasn’t aware that Twitter was experimenting with verified accounts for celebrities, to sidestep this sort of thing (see Nancy Davis Kho’s report at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e20564), common sense might have suggested that material gleaned from social networks would probably benefit from some verification. Maybe there’s something to be said for DIY after all.

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