Thursday Thoughts: Digital Ethnography: Discovering Your Customer Needs in New Ways
Providing ideas and insight that can inform agency and partner strategies for improvement of park, recreation and hospitality operations and assets
Gain New Insight to Your User Needs: Digital Ethnography
Common methods to obtain feedback from your customers include comment cards, surveys and focus groups. The problem with these methods has always been that there is a good chance that you are getting jaded feedback; likely just the answer they want you to hear. With the advent of Trip Advisor and Yelp, customer feedback has become somewhat less jaded, but like comment cards, you tend to hear only from the people that sit at the extremeness of feedback (e.g., happy or unhappy).
CHMGS is currently helping the Department of Defense to develop innovative master planning tools that incorporate more people-centric data. For this project, the CHMGS team is employing digital ethnography, to better understand the needs of the customer/community and what factors support improved quality of life on a military installation
What is Digital Ethnography?
Ethnography is the description of the behavior and phenomenon of individuals, groups, and cultures. It is generally utilized as live observation within a subject’s chosen environment, which helps to reveal individual and organizational influences and drivers. Digital ethnography applies these same research principles to behaviors exhibited online by observing behavior and phenomenon on a variety of digital channels, such as Reddit, Facebook and Instagram. The research also includes community-specific message boards and forums most often used by research subjects. This allows for a far larger volume of observed actions which makes for a more descriptive accounting of volume, visibility and influence on others.
For the Department of Defense, the CHMGS Team is conducting digital ethnographic research into very specific audiences using hand-trained data scientists (from fields such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology) to observe behaviors, identify preferences and channels, and analyze findings. The research is conducted entirely with online resources, applying anthropological principals to the study of behavior and phenomenon exhibited by service members in their own words about the work environment and on and off base services. The research is reviewing past behavior and making note of trends over time. Ultimately, the team’s work is showcasing how digital ethnography and its resulting data outputs can be applied to better understand customer/community needs to inform and improve master planning for installations.
What it means for you!
Public stewards are frequently asking, “what am I not hearing, or who am I not hearing from” when undertaking planning and making operational decisions. If your concern is that your traditional methods are not getting the broadest feedback, maybe it’s time to consider new approaches. To learn more, please contact us!
