• by Karl Greenberg , Staff Writer, October 18, 2008

John Harrobin, SVP marketing and digital media at Verizon explained how important social research is.  Verizon does things like offering  consumers special tickets to concerts, and rewards them for freedback.  "Engagement is in our zone,"  he says.

"We don't have good insights on how customers use our product that we don't measure.  We understand -- its not measurable -- how they use our product. "We have 35% market share on texting.  We thought we had great user interaface and we packaged it for free text. But we launched unlimited texting last year which made texting skyrocket.  We return a little confirm back to phone to confirm to sender that message was sent.  It cost us $10s of millions a year to send that confirm back.  We looked at cost structure, removed it and thought nothing would happen, but we got lost of email calls came in saying what happened to the check mark.  We didn't know that customers look at handset to see if it went through.  that said to me we had a lot to learen there. that was an eye opening experience for me."