The Future of Social Media Research by Annie Pettit

Today I'm happy to post splendid video and interesting article of Annie Pettite, PhD is the Chief Research Officer of Conversition Strategies, who, in my opinion is one of the most prominent Social media researchers.

Original artical is posted on scribemedia.

At Conversition, I’ve heard over and over again that companies are telling their employees do something, anything, in the social media space. With limited guidance, some people turn towards social media monitoring, others to customer relationship monitoring, and still others turn to social media research. Many struggle to differentiate between these offerings and simply go with whichever vendor is first in line.

As researchers ourselves, we understand the value that true market research brings to the table. True market research can come out of surveys, out of focus groups, and, no surprise here, out of social media data. Though social media monitoring can let you know what individual people are saying about a brand, social media research applies scientific principles to that data such that valid and reliable inferences can be made.

One of my favorite examples of correctly applying science to social media data relates to the use of Twitter, a social media tool that appeals to an arguably ‘different’ sort of person. As researchers, we strictly adhere to rules that say data must reflect the population to which you plan to generalize. As such, we know that even though twitter comprises only 7% of internet users, their voices cannot count for 60% of the opinions simply because that is how the data collection happened. Sampling, weighting, standards, norms, and other strict research processes are what place social media research into the market research toolbox.

Another of my favourite examples relates to the seemingly simple task of data quality. Whereas a survey can simply say “Coke” or “Apple” or “BP,” social media research needs to apply extremely strict and complicated data quality processes to ensure that the wrong data is not collected. Clients would certainly not wish to confound their datasets with opinions related to cocaine (coca-cola), apple pie (Apple computers), or blood pressure (BP).

What’s next on the horizon for social media research? Quite simply, predictive analytics based on social media data have arrived and are rapidly gaining momentum. The only reason market research is so important is that it helps users determine which products or services will thrive or fail. Knowing why something is failing right now is certainly useful and allows for real-time corrections and improvements to be made. But, in the long run, predictive research allows users to identify the hits and misses before massive quantities of money have been put into the products. Which television shows will be hits if a small tweak is made? Which shows should simply be pulled off the air? Which shows should be developed?

These are the sorts of things we already do on a regular basis with survey research. Decades of experience have helped us to discover how to create and combine variables to predict the winners of elections and consumer voted contests. We know how to combine past behaviour and intention variables to accurately predict the future. Now we are learning how to do those same things with social media research. We are creating the datasets that will be used to accurately predict the next flavour of chips, the next President, and the next American Idol.

Social Media Quotations

" In the era of Social Media, companies will earn the relationships they deserve."

By Brain Solis

The Art and Science of Social Media and Community Relations, p. 13

Using Twitter in qualitative research (from http://yellowsubmarinequal.wordpress.com/2009/01/14/using-twitter-in-qualitative-research/)

Using Twitter in qualitative research

One of the main points made when crucifying the focus group as a qualitative research tool is its artificiality, its way of abducting the consumer from its natural context and putting him in a moderation room. As a reaction to this shortcoming marketers resort from time to time to more ethnographical approaches, like IHV’s, AST’s etc. The idea is to get the researcher integrated in the natural context. If for focus groups the ideal is going as deep as possible, for the IHV’s is ear dropping.

In this context comes Web 2.0 with all its networking and socializing potential and short after, the idea of using it as a research tool. Add this to the marketing guru frenzy when everybody is desperate to buy a ticket to some bold, bare foot marketing gods that say the same fundamental stuff but with different wrappings, all of them announcing web 2.0 as the second coming. And so, you get a wave of enthusiasm towards research on YouTube. Twitter, blogs, Face book, Yahoo Messenger, forums, online communities etc. Now everybody can eardrop on everybody. And at this point something very interesting happens: people start thinking that this is a great tool researchers can use to tap consumers’ real feelings, wording etc. As a result, a long list of arguments in favour of stalking online communities raging from low costs to the raw, uncorrupted character of the data emerges.

What almost everybody seems to forget is exactly the background. Yes people are not inhibited by a moderator, and mirror, and camera but they are inhibited by themselves, their peers, the medium and many others. Take Twitter for example. In there you choose your crowd. Friends, people that seem to share common interests or common friends are the usual choices. On top of that, come opinion leaders, the cool people of the day and somewhat more official sources – companies. And all these birdies tweet. But they tweet with a reason – they want to be perceived in some manner (a little sparrow wants to be seen as a hawk), or they want to belong to a certain crowd (the duck trying to stay with the swans), they want to have access to the cool links etc. And all these reasons alter what they’re tweeting about, how they do it, when and with whom. And here comes the clever fox thinking that all that it has to do is to listen in on the tweets and find out where the birdies keep their eggs. So it goes to http://search.twitter.com/ and puts in “eggs”. And it sees the sparrow bragging about her big nest in the mountains, the duck saying it has no time to lay eggs as it’s occupied with facial treatments and thinks “jack pot”. But in fact it does not have a clue.

Coming back to the real world, we have to understand that all these web 2.0 developments offer us new ways of conducting research but do not simplify it to the extent of a Google search. It just provides us with more info sources which we still have to interpret against the context. So, do not think that the further away from the moderation room, the more real it is.

New social media research by Lee Rainie

New social media research

by Lee Rainie

Jan 30, 2009


There is a brand new way to assess the content of social media -- blogs, social network sites, video-sharing sites and the like.

Our colleagues at the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism have developed a New Media Index that analyzes the major news topics that are covered by social media participants.

The index draws on the tens of millions of weekly posts and links that are captured by Technorati and Icerocket. The Project then does its own analysis of the content of the news stories that draw the most links from social media sites.

The extra-added bonus is that PEJ each week will compare the material that appears in the New Media Index to its content analysis of the material that appears in its News Coverage Index, a rich content analysis of the stories covered by traditional news organizations.

My strong hunch is that this weekly comparison will provide lots of evidence that bloggers and other social media participants constitute a "fifth estate," the memorable and extremely useful insight of William Dutton, the Director of the Oxford Internet Institute.

Here's how PEJ explains its motive for indexing the top topics that bloggers and other social media participants link to and discuss:

"PEJ is launching the New Media Index as a companion to its weekly News Coverage Index. Blogs and other new media are an important part of creating today's news information narrative and in shaping the way Americans interact with the news. The expansion of online blogs and other social media sites has allowed news consumers and others outside the mainstream press to have more of a role in agenda setting, dissemination and interpretation. PEJ wanted to find out what subjects in the national news the online sites focus on, and how that compared with the narrative in the traditional press."

The latest survey from the Pew Internet Project that was completed on December 20 shows that 11% of American adults are bloggers, and 32% are blog readers.

Source: pewinternet