Like appending every scandal with the word “gate” to it, now it seems that every new approach or revision to anything at all these days gets the “2.0″ moniker. Hey, I mean, did you know that now there are even socks 2.0?

But one area where there’s clearly a legit use of the “2.0″ buzzword (even if you don’t like the whole Web 2.0 moniker) is in the area of market research. Traditional market research has always been about processes like in-person focus groups, mail and phone surveys, quantitative data collection and so on. While all of this is still important, these days the interesting action is how market researchers can collect unsolicited and naturalistic conversation occurring on the Web, as described in this recent New York Times article. (This will all be part of the book I’m working on titled The Art of Strategic Listening, on how to do credible market research and track emerging trends by paying careful attention to discussions on blogs)

Here’s an interesting take on what it means for market research to be going in the 2.0 direction, it’s called, Research 2.0., written by Ray Poynter on his pretty cool blog The Future Place.

Technorati Tags: Market Research

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0