PCI #4 - Reformulating the problem using the ten steps (or at least trying)

Problem:

What is the impact for both the community and the company of community management when advertising a IT product on Twitter ?

People are connected all the time, they check their Twitter timeline often several times a day. Community management is not advertising per say, instead it's small bits of information distilled into the people's timelines that can change the image of a product for potential consumers but really appears like any other tweet and seems as neutral as anything else. How is this perceived by the final user and by the company? Depending on the results the effectiveness of this method can be assessed but mostly I feel that the differences between companies' results could lead to new ways to approach this kind of advertising.

Methods:

Twitter is a fast media. Tweets are short and people are spending the minimum possible amount of time on each tweet, so a short online questionnaire is more suitable for followers. It should be straightforward to have a significant amount of participants, but no one should feel like they have to answer, to avoid people who would fill out the questionnaire without even thinking about it.
Then we should run interviews with some community manager to have a view on the outcome they expect and what is actually happening.
With these methods we could have a broad and not really detailled view on how users feel about community management (and it's possible to sort them in function of the companies they follow) and at the same time focus on why and with what expected and actual outcome a some specific companies are doing this.
There is most probably other good options to study this problem, I just can't find any. Confronting this with another approach from someone intersted in this problem would allow me to refine my view on the problem. I feel rather stuck at this point of the reflection, probably because of a one-sided approach.


This ten step method which presented is in my opinion really heavy to use as it is. I think it actually requires a fair level of competence in formulating research questions and conceptualizing researches to be able to formulate all the intuitive reflections which are behind the decisions we could make. It's really useful though to check if we're not missing a point and assess the relevance of the process but would be heavy to use as a guide through the project. I say we because I think this is way more useful in a group research than alone since it's more difficult to be coherent in the research process especially at the beginning as a group than alone, and those steps have the huge advantage to force the researchers to formulate every aspect of the research and see if all the expectations are the same.