Gary Stein has written a nice article for ClickZ about some free consumer research tools. Gary describes how we uses each of these tools in the article so I suggest you read it. I wanted to share his list of tools with my readers:
- Compete and Alexa are online services that, amazingly, lets you pull traffic data for nearly any site on the Internet.
- Yahoo Answers, or similar services on sites like LinkedIn. Google Answers has been shut down.
- Apps section on Facebook and search for “survey” or “polls,” you’ll find several applications that enable you to send surveys out across the network.
- Google’s trend tool is an amazing way to peek inside the world’s collective unconscious.
All of these are not tried and true market research tools, but they should give you a good place to start gathering ideas and insight. From there you can design a more rigorous customer insight project.
Filed under: Customer Research
