The Future Place Blog

Other types of social media research

In my earlier posts I look at the two main forms of social media research (in terms of revenue), namely communities (MROCs, Community Panels, and Other Communities) and social media monitoring. In this post I look at what I have termed the third type of social media research, i.e. all other social media research.

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Other Forms of Social Media Research

This third category briefly reviews the breadth and diversity that constitutes social media research. Although this group includes some innovative and interesting manifestations of social media research, it should be borne in mind that all of these are currently of much smaller financial importance to the market research industry than communities and social media monitoring.

This catch-all grouping includes the items listed below:

• Netnography
• Smartphone augmented research
• Network analysis
• Social media as a sample source
• Research into social media

Netnography

Netnography is sometimes used to describe social media monitoring, but Robert Kozinet’s highly readable book Netnography has clearly defined Netnography as human-to-human investigation conducted via social media. Indeed, not only does Kozinets exclude the automate processing of conversations, but he makes the case for a participant-observer model with the researcher engaging with the participants.

Netnography can be a very powerful technique in terms of obtaining insight, but it is not seen as a scalable approach as it requires time and skill, so it is likely to remain a specialised niche, applied to a sub-set of research situations, for example research conducted prior to creating a survey or even before submitting a research proposal.

Smartphone Augmented Research

The combination of social media and the increasingly ubiquitous smartphone is opening up a range of research approaches. Communities are tasking members to capture slices of their lives as images and videos and to upload them, systems such as Revelation Project allow respondents to use their smartphone to engage in auto-ethnography, whilst other researchers have started using smartphones as links to surveys, blogs, and research tasks.

Like most of mobile research, the use of smartphones in social media research has added colour and definition, but has not been a major force yet. The material gathered from smartphone augmented research tends to be unstructured text, images, and video, all of which make the analysis expensive, time consuming, and hard to scale.

Network Analysis

Network analysis is based on processing large amounts of behavioural data, including website analytics, social graphs, the flow of terms through social media, the use of bandwidth for social media, geolocation data (for example from FourSquare), media behaviour within social media (for example ads viewed, videos watched, and virtual sites visited).

Research companies are also linking social media analysis with conventional data, for example Gemius provide methods of tracking the online behaviour of panel members, subject to panel members agreeing.

Outside of market research, network analysis is a very large business, part of the business information industry. Within market research network analysis is still relatively undeveloped and it is quite possible that the network analysis services utilised in conjunction with market research will be conducted by mostly non-research organisations.

Social Media as a Sample Source

Social media is where the people are, so the idea of using social media to recruit respondents to conventional surveys is very appealing and fits well with the river sampling approach that has become more popular in recent years.

There are several approaches to using social media as a sample source. Some organisations, such as Peanut Labs (now part of Research Now), have created systems based on a wide variety social networks, with the sample being directed towards conventional surveys. A number of brands with popular social media presences, for example Facebook pages with a large number of fans, utilise them to attract respondents. A number of software vendors have apps or options that facilitate brands to run surveys directly from their social media presences, for example Global Park’s Social Insight Connect works directly from a brand’s Facebook page.

Research into Social Media

One of the big divides between academic and commercial research in the area of social media research is that whilst a large part of academic research looks at the medium itself, most commercial research treats social media as a channel through which to research the wider world, in particular brands and services.

Commercial research into social media tends to be focused on understanding how to generate viral campaigns, to market services in social media, and to understand the nature of influence. One phenomenon that holds back the commissioning of more research into social media is the widespread practice to develop social media tools, approaches, services, and apps by trial and error rather than by prior research.

 

Where do MROCs fit in the current research picture?

As part of a report I am writing I am updating my notes on various aspects of NewMR, and today I turn my eye on MROCs. Below I set out my views, and I would love to hear your views.

MROCs

Online research communities have been growing in impact for several years, and were christened MROCs (Market Research Online Communities) by Forrester in 2008 [‘Will Web 2.0 Transform Market Research’, Forrester, 2008] – a recognition that these research communities were already significant. The growth in MROCs was anticipated by Communispace who pioneered the use of private, branded research communities over the last ten years. During the last three years MROCs have become mainstream with a wide range of providers joining the market place, indeed no market research conference seems complete without at least one paper, and usually more, based on MROCs.

MROCs come in two distinct varieties, the short-term and the long-term, as illustrated by the examples shown below, both supplied by another of the early entrants into this field, UK online specialist Virtual Surveys.

Short-term MROCs

The National Union of Students (the NUS) is the overarching body for UK students, a federation of over 600 separate student bodies. In 2008 the NUS decided to redesign their website and wanted to put students at the centre of the process. A short-term research community was created and operated for two weeks, with 57 students contributing. The students were recruited to represent pre-university applicants, undergraduates, and postgraduates, to ensure that a variety of views and needs were covered.

Over the two weeks the moderator set a variety of tasks for the students and led several discussions, with most students accessing the community more than once a day. Towards the end of the two weeks the community were asked to explore ideas and concepts that had been developed by the NUS’s design agency.

Short-term communities typically run from about two weeks through to about three months, with the number of members ranging from about 25 through to about 300. But there are examples that are shorter, longer, smaller, and larger.

One of the reasons that short-term communities have been adopted so readily is that they tend to fit a specific client need and budget, which means they tend to be direct competitors with traditional qualitative  and bulletin board groups – albeit with sense of being up-to-date and more in tune with the concept of the ‘voice of the customer’.

Long-term MROCs

Long-term, or ongoing, MROCs fulfil a quite different role from short-term communities. Short-term communities tend to be commissioned to answer a single, specific research question. Long-term communities are a research resource, capable of being used for a wide range of problems, but are not normally tasked to just answer a single research question.

The easyJet community dates back to 2008 and was formed with 2000 easyJet customers. The key to the easyJet’s community usefulness is that it is always in use, the agency and easyJet have a weekly teleconference to review the learnings from the previous week, to fine-tune the current week, and to plan the research for the next few weeks. The easyJet community is used for a wide range of research, from concept screening, to ideation, to customer experience. Speaking in 2009 Sophie Dekkers, the Customer Research Manager at easyJet described the community in the following way ‘We were able to conduct more research, for more areas of the business, in a faster timeframe, but within the same budgetary constraints. It will be the blueprint for easyJet customer interaction and research moving forward.’

Ongoing/long-term MROCs tend to last more than six months and are often assumed to be ongoing. The size of the communities is highly variable, with some providers favouring smaller communities of 100 to 200 members, whilst others prefer larger numbers, sometimes over 2000, blurring the boundaries between MROCs and community panels.

Where MROCs fit in the broader research picture?

One of the key characteristics of MROCs is that they are essentially qualitative in nature. Even when surveys and polls are used with MROCs, the special nature of the recruitment of MROCs and the sensitised nature of the participants’ involvement means that the data should be interpreted in a qualitative way, rather than assuming that it is directly comparable with anything from the wider marketplace.

A number of organisations, such as Colmar Brunton and Virtual Surveys have estimated, and published, that the ROI of a well-run MROC is best expressed in terms of clients finding that they can conduct about three times as much research for the same budget. But, rather than this ROI delivering cost savings it tends to result in more topics and questions being researched. Indeed, many clients comment that because of their MROC they research a wide range of topics that previously would not have been researched, things that might have been determined by their own judgement, or by asking ‘family and friends’ to gather some sort of wider view.

One potential issue for clients, and why some of them prefer short-term MROCs rather than ongoing MROCs, is that MROCs can make much greater demands on clients, compared with traditional research. If the same budget is delivering three times as much research this can easily be three times as much work for the client-side researcher, who is often already over-committed in terms of their workload. An MROC works best when it is being used, ideally weekly, this means that one of three strategies needs to be adopted:

1. Somebody at the client is dedicated to running the MROC, and in theory is not given any other significant tasks.
2. The ongoing health and utilisation of the MROC is handled by a third-party (often a research agency, but other options are possible) with somebody at the client controlling the flow of work.
3. The agency running the MROC is put directly in touch with different units and teams within the client organisation, such as NPD, HR, logistics, marketing, finance etc.

The developing role and use of MROCs

MROCs seem to be growing strongly still, but it is possible that they will be eclipsed by community panels as these develop and become more common. In the near future MROCs may simply be a technique that is applied to sub-groups within a community panel.

When MROCs first came on the scene they were relatively straightforward, combining surveys, polls, and discussions. However, over the last three years there has been a major growth in the use of ethnographically inspired techniques, asking community members to capture slices of their own lives, in particular using webcams and their smartphones to enrich the data that is collated – moving the research into an area often referred to as WE-research, and blurring the boundaries with the sort of smartphone/ethnographic research being championed by companies like Revelation. Other companies, such as BrainJuicer and Insites Consulting, have started to put new spins on communities accessing crowd-sourced innovation, for example BrainJuicer’s JuicyBrains Community.

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Well that is my view, what are your thoughts? What would you add? What would you change?

Key themes in listening research

As the preparations are being finalised for next week’s NewMR ‘Listening is the new asking’ event (an online conference), some key themes about listening research are becoming clear and I am sure that they will be major topics during the online event and during the next couple of years.

My feeling is that the key issues are:

1. To what extent can machines replace researchers? You will hear from most of the speakers, such as Anna Tomkocz from Freshminds and Catriona Oldershaw from Synthesio, that sentiment analysis is highly dependent on human intervention. However, you will also hear from Theo Downes-LeGuin that the use of computerised software for qualitative data analysis may shift some tasks away from expensive, senior qualitative researchers towards more junior (aka cheaper) analysts.
2. Is this research market research? Although speakers such as Annie Pettit from Conversition will illustrate how market research can use these blog monitoring and sampling tools, it will also be apparent that most of these tools were made for more than market research. For example, having found influencers some of the software is designed to be used to put the client directly in touch with specific individuals – a process that market research has traditionally defined itself as not doing.
3. Do we really understand what we should be paying attention to? Paul Vittles from the Vittles organisation and John Griffiths from Planning Above and Beyond will both challenge the way researchers think about listening and the implications that has for research.
4. What are the key quality and ethics issues? Most of the speakers will address issues relating to topics such as how much confidence can clients have in the results and the ethical concerns of tools such as scraping and profiling.

You can find out more about the programme for the event by clicking HERE

You can register to attend by clicking HERE

On March 8 you can join in the conversation by following the hashtag #newmr

The other big, but not so important, debate is about what to call this type of research, is it netnography, is it social media research, is it social media monitoring (or mining)? Perhaps the event on March 8 will provide some guidance on that point.

ps if you register for the event you will see we are operating a donations method of registering, where people can pay what they feel they ought. Some have paid, some have not, some who have not paid will do so after the event, whilst some will probably be happy not to pay.

The event sponsor is Zinc Research

The mainstreaming of ‘social’ in MR in 2011

This year I have had a pretty leisurely holiday period and one consequence is that I have not been engaging in my usual start of year prognosticating. However, as I slowly acclimate back into a work schedule my eye was caught by the news, in Research-Live, that GfK and Passenger are partnering in order for GfK to enhance its online communities offer.

This stimulated my first prediction of the year, 2011 is going to be the year when social MR really starts to go mainstream. Over the next year, and in 2012, I think we will see partnerships, acquisitions, mergers, consolidations, upscaling, standardisation of offers. 

The lead ‘social’ products are going to be MROCs and Social Media Research (the mining, monitoring, and analysing of naturally occurring online conversations). I am pretty sure we will also see significant growth in the use of smartphones in research, particular in the area of using them to get people to record aspects of their lives.

Both of the key growth areas, MROCs and SMR (Social Media Research) will generate some significant problems in terms of ethics, quality issues, and competitive context (both non-research competitors entering MR and MR projects expanding into other domains, in particular marketing). 

But despite these problems I predict that 2011 will see the mainstreaming of these social research approaches, which means we will also see some pretty big ‘issues’ during 2011 and 2012, ones that will make things like Nielsen’s scraping of PatientsLikeMe seem like a minor infraction. 

My top tip for 2011? Try not to make the news as being responsible for a really serious ethical or quality problem!

[BTW, a few people probably already think social is mainstream. I estimate that there are about 5000 researchers globally who are really into different aspects of social media and research - and many of us are in touch through more than one social link. However, I also estimate that 95% of market researchers have not used an MROC, smartphone research, netnography, or Social Media Research yet. For me mainstream would have to mean at least one-in-eight of researchers being involved.]

 

Some Great Fringe Events!

The Festival of NewMR is getting really close now and the buzz is beginning to build, including some great Fringe events, i.e. event organised by other people.

What’s best, online qual or in-person qual?
This is the question being debated online on Friday 10 December. The debate is being organises by BAQMaR (the exciting organisation based in Belgium) and has some great speakers for and against. Find out more by clicking here.

Under 30, Find out about the RLF challenge
The RLF (the Research Liberation Front) are a great example of a British phenomenon, people pretending to be joking, whilst actually engaged saying something serious, usually something that can’t easily be said in polite society. At the moment the RLF is focusing on how the MR industry should attract and develop new talent and is organising a great event to coincide with the Festival of NewMR. Find out more by clicking here.

Measuring the Discourse about NewMR
Nigel Legg is conducting a project to find out and report what people are saying about NewMR and will be presenting his findings here.

The LonBono Fund
Henrik Hall is a Swedish researcher who is trying to make a difference and has created a project that is helping market researchers from less developed markets to attend conferences and events, so that knowledge and contacts can be shared. Find out more here.

More Fringe Events?
There are other events being developed and they will appear shortly on the Fringe’s main page. If you have an event you would like to contribute, contact me as soon as possible to discuss.

 

 

 

Social Media and Ethics

Whilst at the recent ESOMAR Congress in Athens I created a vignette in my mind to help explain the many issues that can arise. Consider the following hypothetical example:

In Facebook I discover the “ACME TV and Video” page which has a wide variety of posts on it from people who use or like or are interested in ACME TVs and ACME videos. Because I do not want to keep visiting the site I create a script in my favourite web scraper to log in every day and to collect all new posts and to put them in a database for me. 

For my client, a major electronics company based in the US, I produce a report, based on social media, looking at the different social contexts of the consumers home electronics. I note within this ACME page a 200 word poem written by a member of the page who writes about how her neighbour’s 8 year old daughter is often left at home on her own and uses the TV to feel less alone and lonely.

In my report I include a copy of the poem and I mention that it is taken from the ACME TV page. However, in order to protect the 'respondent anonymity', I change her name to some fictitious name.

So, what’s wrong with any of that? Well let’s count some of the ways that come readily to mind as potential problems.

1. By using a web scraper to collect data from Facebook I have broken the terms and conditions of my use of Facebook.
2. By using material for Facebook for my commercial research I may have further broken the terms and condition that I signed up to when I joined Facebook.
3. If the person I collected the data from was under 16 (according to the UK MRS rules) then I have collected data from a child without prior parental permission.
4. By not quoting the author of the post I have broken many conventions about properly citing and crediting sources.
5. By quoting the poem in its entirety, without permission and without citing I may have breached copyright issues.
6. By using a literal quote I may have made it possible for the author to be identified. Because I have named the group the client could use a web scraper to load all recent posts and then search for the text in the report.
7. Not only may I have compromised the anonymity of the author, but if they post photos, if they have not protected their profile, I may have provided access to personal information such as mobile phone number.
8. Because I may have identified the author, I may also have identified the existence and identity a vulnerable child left alone.
9. Because the data is personally identifiable it falls under (in the UK) under the Data Protection Act, which means I need to hold it securely, and I can’t simply send it overseas to the US which has a different set of legal protections.

I am sure there are other problems that people can highlight, but I hope that the vignette will help illustrate that when we are working inside the area of social media we need to be very careful and we need to think about what we are doing.

In thinking about social media we need to think about: laws, terms and conditions, market research ethics, and other relevant codes, practices, and expectations. The general concept of informed consent will still provide a good guide, but we need to be clear about whose consent and how we ensure that it is informed consent.

A Festival of NewMR

An exciting new type of event is being created, a Festival of NewMR, celebrating all of the new trends and changes in market research, and doing it an open source, collaborative way. 

The Festival of NewMR is an online, virtual event that will take place between 6-10 December. The model for the event is loosely based on the Edinburgh Festival, i.e. with a formal agenda and an alternative Fringe.

Although the programme is still being developed the key elements are beginning to emerge:

1. The Main Stage, a global webinar conference on 8 December, starting in New Zealand and finishing some 20 hours later on the West Coast of the US.
2. A Poster session and a Video competition, to entice in new faces including students.
3. A Twitter backchannel.
4. A Fringe, an assortment of activities created by third-parties to take place during the Festival Week.

One of the great things about the Festival of NewMR is that it is affordable. Most of the activities will be free, the premier event the Main Stage, will cost just $20 for a session (there are three sessions in total covering three wide time zones).

The programme for the Main Stage will be a mixture of invited speakers and speakers selected by the participants of the Festival. The call for synopses is open now.

To find out more about the Festival of NewMR, visit www.newmr.org

You can save £75 on my next MRS Social Media Workshop!

On November 5th I am re-running my Social Media and Market Research for the MRS, to be held in London, UK. I have been allocated places with a £75 price reduction as part of the promotion of the course.

If you would like to attend the course and would like a £75 discount on the price, email me your contact details during August (at [email protected]) and I will forward them to the MRS to obtain the discount – beware, it is first come, first served.

Using Tweetreach to evaluate tweets

There are many uses of Twitter, some use it to follow famous people, some use it to glean important news and product information, market researchers often use it as a source of market research. But, of course, many people use it to broadcast a message they hope will reach as many people as possible.

One great tool to find out how far a tweet has reached is tweetreach.com.

For example, on Tuesday's in the UK a number of fire services have started reminding people to test their smoke and carbon dioxide alarms, using the hashtag #testittuesday. So, late afternoon I used Tweetreach.com to tell me how far the hashtag #testittuesday had reached. The answer, by 17:30 UK time, was 7164 (try it here, the results will vary according to when you run Tweetreach.com).

Of the 7164, 5296 had received just one tweet on the topic, 1792 had receive 2 or 3 tweets with the hashtag #testittuesday in it, and 75 people had received 4-7 tweets including #testittuesday.

Of the 25 tweets recorded by Tweetreach.com, 7 were tweets and 18 were reTweets.

Note, it is reTweet that gives Twitter its viral power. If you tweet something interesting people will reTweet it, extending its reach. The best analogy I have heard is like a dog that barks in the night. nearby dogs hear it and they start barking, then the dogs near them hear the barking and they start - this barking and re-barking is like tweeting and reTweeting.

So, if you want to be successful in getting your tweets to travel here are four things that help:

1. Have as many people following you on Twitter as possible, to give it a good start
2. Make you tweet as interesting as possible
3. Keep you tweet well under 140 characters, under 100 is good, when people tweet it typically makes the tweet longer, if you have used the 140 character limit, the reTweeter will have to edit it.
4. Try asking people to reTweet it, e.g. pls RT

ps in the 45 minutes between researching this article, writing it, and publishing it, the number of people reached by the hashtag #testittuesday went up to 7986.

Social Media Training in the US?

After I posted an article on my blog about an upcoming MRS Training course in London, I was asked by Niyati Kanani asking whether there are similar courses in the US.

I was sure there were and I asked a question on Twitter and Facebook and within about 12 hours I had several answers, include:

Shibin Varghese suggested that eleven marketing run courses.

Christine Walker suggested that the ARF run a number of courses in New York.

Tom Stone made two suggestions, Social Media Training Camp and this result from a Google search finding 123 Social Media.