It’s so easy to knock ‘traditional’ research in these heady days of social media. Augustine Fou of Omnicom offers a prime example in this ClickZ article on metrics. He kicks off with a sentence beginning: “The problem with traditional market research is…” then goes on to talk about “flawed and inaccurate techniques like surveys or focus groups”.

Fou has some good points to make, of course, about the wealth of data out there in social media and the value of looking at what people do rather than what they say they do. But when he talks about the ‘traditional’ alternatives, there’s less meat to his argument. ‘Research’ is just shorthand for a lack of guts or imagination. By all means let’s get excited about the opportunities that social media offers, but let’s not make ‘research’ the scapegoat for everything that’s done wrongly.