Social Media in 2015 – Collaboration Invitation

SwirlSocial Media in 2015 – a collaborative review
This post announces a collaborative review of social media research and it is also an open invitation for people and organisations to take part.

Objective
To examine and highlight the benefits that social media research can currently deliver.

Overview
The timeline will be:

  • March: Declarations of interest
  • April: Project creation
  • May: Data collection
  • June: Analysis and reporting

The project is being organised by Ray Poynter and NewMR.Book

The Project
The topic of the research will be market/marketing research. The two core search terms will be ‘marketing research’ and ‘market research’ (and equivalents in other languages).
The two business objectives are:

  1. Increase the use of MR (which is taken to include increasing the value of MR, increasing the number of situations where MR is used, and increasing the number of people using MR).
  2. Increasing the number of suitably qualified people who want to work in the market research industry/profession.

The research questions are:

  1. What are the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats in the context of using MR for in decision making?
  2. What are the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunies, and Threats in the context of people wanting to work in MR?
  3. Where are most of the MR related posts/discussions happening?
  4. How do the terms market research and marketing research relate to other terms such as insight, BI, big data etc?

Suggest changes to the project
In March and early April we are open to hearing suggestions about changes to the way the project is being run. From about April 12 we will need to lock the project down so that people can set up their processes to collect data in May.

Taking Part
If you want to take part, just let me know by email, admin@newmr.org. We are happy for as many people/companies to take part as want to.
Every participant is welcome to interpret the project in the way they see fit. You can leave part of it out, or you can include extra elements.
Pretty much the only two rules are that you collect data in May and by June 21 you give us the results to publish.
In order to make our life simple we are suggesting that the results should be a short piece of text and a PDF. The PDF can include as many pages as you like, it can be a one-page infographic or a 30 page report. Your text can include a link to further data, to a dashboard, or to more reporting.
We will publish every submission we get and Ray Poynter will also publish an overarching review of what we have learned.

Copyright and IP
Everything submitted to NewMR for reporting will be published on NewMR.org and will be considered open and unrestricted. Of course, participating organisations can decided what to include in their reporting, and can report more extensively elsewhere.

Tracking?
If the project is successful, e.g. it finds out something useful and it is felt to be a good demonstration of how and why people should be using social media research we will look to turn this project into a tracking project. However, no decision will be made on that until July 2015 at the earliest.