The Blog of Burgher Jon

Historically, Sociology is a largely qualitative discipline.  This is primarily due to the fact that conducting experiments is difficult (how do you have enough subjects to simulate an entire society?) and observation is time-consuming (involving watching several similar societies in an attempt to isolate the effect of a single variable).  With the age of the web, social media, and computer-aided statistics this has fundamentally changed.  Now companies and academic institutions alike perform countless social experiments daily on the web.   What’s the societal reaction to Obama’s State of the Union?  Forget waiting for polling data, let’s ask Twitter.  See and 2:33 through 3:45 of the clip above, though John Stewart is taking a shot at CNN’s use of Twitter.  More enlightened minds then CNN could use this immense amount of data productively.

When I talk about these differences I like to compare two recent best-selling authors; Malcolm Galdwell and Stephen Levitt.  Galdwell takes a very qualitative approach (he’s an author after all) and Levitt takes a very quantitative approach (he’s an economist after all).  If you read Freakenomics and Tipping Point (crime in New York City) or Freakenomics and Outliers (education) they even take on a couple of the same issues.  It’s fairly interesting to think through the pros and cons of each approach.

This is just my opinion, but here’s what I think I’ve learned from reading both authors and thinking about quantitative and qualitative sociology as it applies to our business:

1. Think of as many ways to use good qualitative methods as you possibly can.  If you want to test a website design, why not post it for a few days or to a few of your customers and see how it impacts traffic to your site or conversion rates?  There’s no reason to trust the qualitative marketing consultant on this one.
2. When you can’t use quantitative approaches it is important to seek out qualitative analysts with a “nose for the market”.  Some people have it and some people don’t, you know it as well as I do.  This is why CEOs who launched risky but successful products are in such high demand.  They were able to perceive that society was morphing in to a new market (which is impossible to test quantitatively).  Get as many of these people as you can on your marketing team.  Trust me, I know a couple and they’re not all 7-9 figure CEOs.
3. A theory that makes sense either qualitatively or quantitatively but not both, is HIGHLY suspect.  It’s still possibly true, but it’s suspect.  For example, small businesses will like Twitter because it can drive business.  However, there are (relatively) few small businesses using it effectively.  The original, qualitative, theory may be true even though I can’t find much quantitative evidence for it (largely because simply going to twitter.com and looking for small businesses that are using Twitter effectively, is hardly scientific quantitative analysis), but it’s enough to give me pause before I believe the first theory.