White Paper - Social Media Studies, the New Revolution of Insights

" Doctor Gallup knows the thoughts of millions of people he doesn't know. " This is how a French newspaper described in 1939 the extraordinary power of a new scientific method, which had emerged a few years earlier in the United States and was made famous by George Gallup during the American presidential election of 1936: opinion polling. Mathematics proves it: it is enough to question a "representative" sample of a few hundred or thousand people to accurately know the thoughts of millions of others. Nearly a century later, this scientific discovery is still perfectly relevant, and new surveys are conducted daily in the fields of politics, health, research, and marketing.

Since the first face-to-face surveys were conducted, the various technological revolutions of the telephone and then the internet have transformed the way
to gather opinion. The last two decades have been marked by the emergence of mobile and by the exceptional development of social networks. Unsurprisingly, surveys are also conducted today via mobile-adapted questionnaires, and distributed through social networks in an automated way. Thus, 4.6 billion social media users around the world are now accessible almost instantaneously, ready to share their opinions on the topics that concern them. For brands, this is a tremendous opportunity in their quest to be increasingly agile and increasingly "consumer-centric," adapting as best as possible to consumer expectations...