The Future Place Blog

Help us with our Twitter Session at ESOMAR APAC

9:00am Tuesday morning, 27 April 2010, Angela Gao, Shizue Vieria, and Ray Poynter are presenting a session on Twitter to the ESOMAR APAC Conference in Kula Lumpur.

We would really appreciate your help if you are a Twitter user.

Please look at the three questions below and tweet your answers, using the hashtags #qstn1 #qstn2 and #qstn3 as appropriate.

#qstn1 Which country would you most like to visit in 2011?

#qstn2 What is your favourite drink?

#qstn3 How would you  define market research in 140 characters?

Many thanks, please use the hashtags as we will need them to find your answers.

You can follow the ESOMAR conference using the Twitter hashtag #esoa

Do you need a 101 on how to use social media for market research?

Conferences are great for getting a sense of what is going on, but they tend to leave you wondering about how to actually get started. If you are new to social media research where should you start, what are the top ten tips, what are the pitfalls to watch out for?

On June 8 I am running an all day workshop for the MRS on exactly this topic. I will be leading the day and I have a couple of top notch experts lined-up to join me.

Remember, places are limited, so if you want to get started on the social media path, book soon.

To find out more about the course click here (you can book online).

---

I also offer in-house training on social media and market research and from September anybody booking an in-house course will get a copy of my book Handbook of Online and Social Media Research - however I am just about fully booked until late September.

What is ethical market research?

At both the ESOMAR meeting in London on Wednesday and at the ASC conference on Thursday the related topics of quality and ethics were discussed several times. The growth in the use of online access panels (or convenience samples as I prefer to call them) and the events in the UK over the last couple of days relating to opinion polling and the General Election (check http://search.twitter.com/search?q=yougov) have made this a hot topic. (Last night 3 polls were published which had very different results, this has resulted in public ridicule  for MR).

This leads me to want to define my view of what I mean by both quality and ethics. 

The first point I would make is that quality is really just a sub-set of the ethics issue. What we mean by quality is, IMHO, defined by our position on ethics. Ethics says what we should do, quality is doing it well and at least doing it as well as we have said or implied we would do.

The second point is that we have to define market research in order to be able to define where and when the ethics apply and what they cover.

My definition of market research is that it is a business service providing information and advice to organisations about market related activities based on human beliefs, attitudes, actions, and intentions.

In my view this means market research does not include:

•    Academic research

•    Social research

•    Medical research

•    Geological and mineral surveys

•    Analysis of industrial processes

Many market researchers will also conduct academic, medical, and social research, but the ethics of those disciplines are different. For example, academic and social research can be conducted in ways that bring harm to the subjects, if the public good is large enough. Surprised? Check the US Federal law on Protection of Human Subjects, or think about the number of times that drugs trial cause bad effects, where the ethics simply require that the risk is minimised, that the subjects are properly informed, and that the potential benefit is big enough.

By contrast, in market research it is never acceptable for the design to knowingly risk harm to the subjects. The ‘good’ that market research generates is commercially for the client, hopefully our new collaborative research will also generate some general good as well, but it is hard to imagine the public good of a new brand of cheese is ever going to worth knowingly putting people at the risk of harm

So, what would I define as ethics? Well I have a pretty simple set of 3 points:

1. Say what you are doing. For example, if you are using a convenience sample and using modelling techniques to forecast the market, say so.
2. Do what you say you are doing. If you say you are using a technique based on the science of random probability sampling, then make sure you are.
3. The method you are using should be based on a recognised body of knowledge or thought and should be capable of being refuted or verified. For example, astrology and phrenology are not acceptable market research methods.

To give a real world example of what I think should happen is that when an online access panel is used the researcher should not use sampling error statistics as an implied measure of validity. They can be used as an indicator of reliability, that is fine, but not validity. I would like researchers to adopt a more engineering frame of mind and talk about experience and tolerances. For example, rather than saying science shows we can only be wrong 5% of the time, say “historically, based on X number of tests, we have only been wrong Y% of the time, so we feel confident is suggesting ….”. 

So, those are my thoughts and ethics, what is your view?

What happens if the ash stays over Europe for a year?

One of the standard parts of futurism is to conduct mind experiments to explore scenarios. At the moment there are no air flights over most of Northern Europe, because of volcanic ash. The ash is being caused by a eruptions in Iceland, at the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano.

According to the news services it seems the most likely event is that it will clear up over the next few days and things will get back to normal, but with a massive, further, hit to the profits of airlines.

But what if it does not clear up? The last time this volcano erupted was 1821, and that time it lasted for a year. 

So, perhaps we should consider 3 scenarios:

It clears up in a few days and does not return. This would simply make it like a bad weather incident, or a strike. It would have few long term implications.

It clears up, but returns for a few days at a time for a year or two. This would start to chip away at Europe’s standing in the world. Businesses, conferences, organisations would probably change the balance of how much they were focusing on Europe, in favour of other locations. Tourism could be hit very hard, both in-bound and out-bound.

The problem lasts a year (or more). This could result in the business, academic, and social isolation of Europe. Companies would ‘temporarily’ move headquarters to other locations, conferences would be held elsewhere, tourism would shift from planes to trains, with major consequences. It is likely that there would be rush to develop technology, looking for remote meetings, distance teaching, and for modifications to planes to make them able to fly through the cloud. This scenario would be very bad for Europe; it would be a major acceleration in its slide into irrelevance.

Twitter and the election, voyeurs, participants, or distraction

At the moment the UK is in the middle of a general election, which will select the government for the next four or five years. Last night in the UK the leaders of the three main parties held a televised debate, which, amazingly, was the first time a televised debate had been held in the UK.

The Twitter back-channel last night really came of age, with over 184,000 tweets being sent, using the hashtag #leadersdebate. The question that the volume of Twitter raises in my mind is whether it was simply a bunch of voyeurs, a new version of the ‘chattering classes’, or were the people Tweeting the avant guarde, i.e. shock troops who will initiate change, perhaps by contributing to momentum?

This article from the Telegraph (a pro-Conservative newspaper) has a good analysis of the different media (traditional and social) and they way they interacted with the debate.

Between now and May 6 (election day) the UK is likely to conduct an enormous experiment in the role of Twitter and social media in elections, along with extensive use of traditional routes such as billboards, phone, and mail. Note, the UK does not permit TV advertising for political parties.

Is it just me or is it getting really busy?

Over the past month I have been amazed by how busy most of my contacts and clients are (most of my clients being research agencies, conference companies, and training agencies). If my contacts are a reasonably representative the market research industry would appear to be back with a bang, despite the woes often reported in our trade magazines. Certainly I am busier than I have been for years, with only a few days left to sell before August.

I wonder if one of the issues is that our industry downsized too far during the recession? In particular, are there now too few junior researchers, i.e. the people who do most of the work? 

As a keen student of economics, I would ‘intellectually’ expect to see prices rise, since demand seems to be outstripping supply, especially for the large or complex projects. However, I wonder if market research companies have become too cowed by the recession and might persist in offering give away prices? 

At the moment I am processing the ESOMAR Prices data and they will be publishing the findings in June, in Research World. I am at the stage where I still don’t know how prices will compare with 2007, and I wonder if we will see that there has been large scale cost cutting? (Of course, once I do know, I won’t be saying until the report comes out in June).

So, how busy are you? I have put a poll on my page in MRSpace, click here to see the poll and to vote (if you want to).

ESOMAR move APAC Conference from Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur

Because of the tragic and worrying circumstances in Thailand, ESOMAR have announced that they have had to move their APAC Conference from Bangkok to Kuala Lumpur. The dates remain the same April 25 to 27. The ESOMAR Website has information about the change and about the new venue.

Speaking as one of the people who was scheduled to present in Bangkok, I am sure that ESOMAR have made the right decision, the safety of delegates, speakers, staff, and exhibitors has to be the first consideration.

ESOMAR also has an FAQ section on their website.

Moving a conference with less than two weeks to go is an enormous undertaking and ESOMAR will need as much co-operation as possible, as will the delegates, speakers, and exhibitors. I understand that the local contacts in both Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur are pulling out all the stops to make sure that the Conference is a success.

Hopefully most of the delegates, speakers, and exhibitors who were planning to go to Bangkok will be able to change their plans. Indeed, some people who had not booked to attend in Bangkok may now be able to attend in Kuala Lumpur.

Of course, our main thoughts must be with the people of Thailand and a hope that the situation can be resolved both justly and peacefully.

Are MROCs essentially qual or quant, and does it matter?

There is a great discussion going on in LinkedIn about MROCs and the nature of the research that can be conducted using them, find it here if you are a member of LinkedIn.

I think that MROCs are essentially a qual medium and I think the difference matters. Below is the text I posted in the discussion explaining why, and setting out my thoughts.

I think the discussion about qual and quant matters, because it defines the nature of the truth we are telling to our clients. We can think about this split at two levels, IMHO 

1) Traditional MR quant vs qual. Quant measures those things that can be readily measured and which it feels can be projected numerically onto some larger population. Qual identifies meanings and uses the researcher as a prism to identify which meanings are likely to be generalisable and useful. 

2) The epistemological split. The post-positivists look for those relationships which can be estimated numerically and assume (as a working hypothesis) that they are genuine. The constructionists look for patterns of behaviour(assuming that these patterns either do not have a mathematical underpinning or that such underpinning is too complex to be revealed) which can lead to a truth being constructed by the observer, ideally one that can help people deal with other situations. 

In social media in general, and in MROCs in particular, there are major problems with the post-positivist/quant interpretation of the truth. 

1) The nature of environment is changing so fast that it is unlikely that truths are sufficiently long-lived to be measured with numbers and then projected elsewhere. 

2) The power of the medium is conversation and the quantitative tools for analysing text are extremely limited and primitive. 

3) The leading thinking by exponents such as Kozinets is that the researcher needs to be a participant-observer to gain real value from these communities, but that means that the truths are going to be more constructionist than post-positivist. All MROCs are, IMHO, examples of participant-observer studies, the researcher is changing both the discourse and the context. 

I do not think it matters too much about how we describe the qual/quant split to end users, they simply want good insight and good advice. But I think it matters that we understand the nature of the truths we are dealing with. 

I would like to come back to a point Rosie Campbell has made elsewhere, we must avoid allowing the analysis of communities to descend to simply counting the words. A Wordle is a great diagram, but it is not any form of analysis. 

In the world of MROCs I would like to see polls as simply another stimulus for a qual investigation, and I think we can construct a toolkit where a survey is just another tool, to sit alongside other qualitative tools such projective techniques, and where the analysis of the quant data simply sits next to such approaches as grounded theory, semiotics, and hermeneutics - but where is does not try to claim pre-eminence.

Books about online conversations

In drawing plans together for a book on deriving insights from on-line conversations it is important to assess what is already published to ensure that a new book meets a genuine need and builds on what is already available.

Two books I have found useful are:

• Robert Kozinets Netnography
• Mike Thelwall's Introduction to Webometrics

Katie Harris has suggested Annette Markham & Nancy Baym Internet Inquiry, which looks like a really interesting book.

What resources are you aware of (they don't need to be books in the traditional sense)?

How big will e-books be, how quickly?

The Economist has an interesting article about the growth in e-publishing, with views and comments on Amazon’s Kindle and the threats and opportunities offered by Apple’s iPad.

The Economist quotes two predictions about the future scale of e-books, PriceWaterhouseCoopers things e-books will be about 6% of the North American market by 2013 (compared with 1.5% in 2009). By contrast a spokesperson from publisher Simon and Schuster thought the USA figure might be 25%.

This got me thinking, what do I think is likely to happen, and how quickly do I think that it is going to happen.

I think my gut feel is that I would go with the lower figure in the short term, i.e. about 6% in 2013, in markets such as the US. I think this for several reasons. At the moment the book format has several advantages

1. Great battery length.
2. When reading in a risky situation (e.g. bath, train, in rucksack one is only risking the cost of the book, not the reader). 
3. Does not look odd or daft.
4. Great for impulse buys (might require reading glasses for some of us, but not the reader).

In the longer term (4 to 8 years) I expect to see three changes:

1. Growth in the number of people listening to audio books.
2. Growth in people comfortable reading e-books, perhaps more on their iPhone than their iPads, in the way Japanese commuters read keitai shousetsu (mobile phone novels).
3. New formats of books, much shorter, or sold one chapter at a time (perhaps similar to the way Charles Dickens initially published his books weekly or monthly and later compiled them into books).

Net, I expect people to spend people to spend fewer hours reading in 8 years than they do now, regardless of format.