How is social networking influencing lifestyles in the CEE

Added: (Thu Oct 29 2009)

Pressbox (Press Release) - Bucharest, Romania, October 29th – Facebook reports that there are more than 1.8 million active users (once a week or more) across 19 Eastern European countries, with most users in Serbia and Croatia. Poland’s Nasza Klasa claims to register 20,000 new members on a daily basis. Hi5 network has ~2,3 million users in Romania, being by far #1 there.

Right, most users are within the 18-34 group of age, however this is widening and older people are joining in. It’s well known that CEE markets have strong communities of workers in the Western Europe and even across the ocean: starting 1990’s there has been a regular movement from east to west in search for a better life.

The reality is that social networking offers the chance to those that stayed in the home country to keep family together, plus access to a free and friendly tool to communicate, share photos or strengthen up relationship with old friends. Let’s face it, there was no way for phone or email to do the same.

The #2 most important change that social networking brings into the CEE area is related to politics. Probably the so called “Twitter revolution” is something not many have heard about. The fact is that Twitter did help protesters against Moldova’s former communist regime back in April 2009 to gather ad hoc in the center of capital and take authorities by surprise with an impressive 10,000-15,000 people, something that never happened before in country’s history. And most of all, without any warning at all - all of a sudden.
Although very young - most of them were not older than 30 - their action had success eventually and communist regime resigned – and yes, Twitter had a good involvement in this because it offered people an uncensored way to communicate and share common views.

Bottom line: whether by "tweeting" information to their fellow citizens, posting videos online, or publishing non-state-controlled news stories, democracy advocates have embraced new technologies. No more one-to-many communication and putting censorship on every other „undesired” media channel.
Citizens across the former Soviet Union are using new media to assert their rights and challenge abuses of power, like they never did before. And probably it will be more and more difficult for the authoritarian regimes worldwide to keep voices from being heard with the new technologies.

# 3 change
One highly visible effect is that companies are given the unique opportunity to have a direct communication with their potential B2C markets, something that never happened before.

A good PR can do a preliminary qualitative research and gather all positive/negative feedback out there that may have a bad influence on brand equity, image or reputation. Then quantitative can tell exactly where’s the issue with product/service X and what can be done to bring things back on tracks or get them better.

The thing is that social networking and social media let consumers say what they want, where they want, in the shape they want – and all, in real time. In a way, it does the job of the good old marketing practices before you know it. Industries just need to encourage talking and be ready to capture feedback.

It’s a fact that social networking is not something you can leave aside when thinking to target Central and Eastern Europe markets; and that refers to both sides: producers of various goods and those that help them sell better (PR, marketing, advertising etc.), including market research.
BrainActive keeps this opportunity under a close eye and seeks for ways to better understand how social networking and social media influences Eastern Europe’s consumption habits, purchase intents or purchase decision making process.


About BrainActive Market Research
BrainActive Market Research is the premier provider of online market research solutions in the Central and Eastern Europe area. Its extensive network of actively managed online panels currently covers 19 countries, including all of the emerging markets in the region: Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary. BrainActive offers access to a total of 1.6+ million consumer or business-to-business online research respondents, carefully recruited to represent the general offline population of each country.

Additional client services include survey programming and hosting, data processing, sample management and deployment, sampling consulting and online survey optimization.