What is Social Media Research?

At the moment I am writing a 3500 word article for one of the leading market research journals on the current state of play with respect to social media research. As part of the process of writing it, I have set down what I think the term Social Media Research currently encompasses. I would love to hear other people’s views about the term does and does not cover.

In order to try and structure my thoughts, I have started by creating three broad areas, or rather two broad areas and a catchall. My feeling is that these reflect the current commercial realities. These three groups are:

1. Social Media Monitoring, relating to naturally occurring discourses.
2. Purposed Communities, e.g. MROCs, Community Panels, and brand communities such as MyStarbucksIdea and the more than 22 million people who like the Starbucks Facebook page.
3. Other uses of social media for research.

My feeling is that the first two are relatively clearly bounded areas and currently are much more significant in terms of research spend than the third category. This might change, particularly since that perpetual ‘next big thing’, i.e. mobile research, is in this third group, but as far as the second half of 2011 and 2012 are concerned I think social media monitoring and purposed communities are where the big bucks will be.

In terms of the third category, the others uses of social media include:

1. Research into the use of social media, including studying the way that messages and influence flow in social media.
2. The use of social media as sample source for conventional research.
3. Netnography, conducting ethnographical studies in cyberspace.
4. The integration of social media data with conventional research, for example tracking online panel members’ use of social media.
5. Network analysis and other analytics.
6. WE-Research, for example getting people to use smartphones to capture slices of their life and then to share them socially with researchers and other participants.
7. True social media innovations such as gathering insight through gaming, foursquare, and collaborations like social bookmarking and quora.

Beyond these areas there are plenty of projects that utilise social media, but boundaries have to be drawn somewhere if illumination is going to be created.

What are your definitions of what social media research is, and perhaps what it is not?

Comments

[Ray Poynter]

Hi Theo, I have put netnography into the catch-all, because of its smaller commercial relevance. Much as I love netnography (by which I take Kozinet's definition of ethnography via computer mediated communications)it can't be scaled in a way that competes in revenue terms with communities and social media monitoring.

I think the distinction between social media as a medium to research the 'regular' world and as a subject for study is important, but again in terms of commercial market research the lion's share goes and probably will continue to go to using social media to understand brands and people, not to the specifics of the medium itself.

[Theod_l]

Ray, I undertook a similar taxonomy for internal purposes and came up with 3 categories: monitoring and related analyses of that content; MROCs; and netnographies. So, very similar to your first list though I felt netnography was a distinct enough discipline to deserve it's own place on the list, and in retrospect I should have had a fourth catchall.

I would propose an alternative view, however, which: research using social media that is about social media; and research using social media that is about something else. Right now MROCs, netnographies, and most monitoring generally fall into the second category - we are simply using social media as a new content source and approach to understanding topics that exist offline as well. But some monitoring activities, influencer analysis, context analysis etc. also begin to edge into study of the social sphere as its own phenomenon, separate from or at least as an additional layer on top of the core study focus.

[Ray Poynter]

I would probably class social media context analysis as part of social media monitoring. I am not very happy with the name social media monitoring as it implies a passive mind set that waits to see what happens. The tools can equally be used to search for things, which is why the term blog mining was popular for a while, until blogs turned out to be such a small part of social media. There are also fields like psycholinguistics that look at the types of language being used in different contexts.

A new umbrella name is needed, but social media monitoring appears to be the best to hand. Annie Pettit has made a strong case for the use of social media research to be used exclusively for the reading and searching of naturally occurring social media discourses, but I think that ship has sailed, social media research is in use to describe a much wider range of approaches and techniques.

[Piplzchoice]

Interesting undertaking Ray. I wonder how you would classify social media context analysis? There are text analytics companies that use social media content to produce research and intelligence of different types.