Listening to talk about Beacons

The social media research contribution from empirica takes a slightly different angle from most of the other reports in the GreenBook / NewMR collaborative review of the benefits of social media research. Rather than researching market research as a whole, it looks specifically at one technology, namely that of beacons. You can read the full empirica report by clicking here. Beacons are widely tipped as being one of the key elements of marketing and market research over the next few years. Beacons are used to help locate a customer or research participant. The early beacons did this through a high frequency sound signal (high as in too high for humans to hear). The current leading example of a beacon is the iBeacon from Apple, which uses Bluetooth. Empirca listened to the conversations in social about beacons and identified to broad locations for the discourse, marketing and technology. The empirica study focused on the marketing discussion and found the discourse to be overwhelmingly positive. The report goes on to list the sorts of comments made and the topic areas covered. Empiraca went on to plot the interactions and potential influencers for the conversations about beacons. Not surprisingly there were relatively few […]

Who else is talking about market research?

The fifth contribution to the GreenBook / NewMR collaborative review of social media research is from Affinio. You can read their full report by clicking here. The core of Affinio’s investigation asked and answered the question “Who’s talking about market research other than market researchers?” Affinio looked at the nearly 18,000 people who follow the ARF’s Twitter handle (@theARF) and segmented them into 10 tribes. As Affinio illustrate with a great diagram, 9 of the 10 tribes tend to be interconnected, but the 10th tribe, MRX people, is internally interconnected but relatively unconnected from the other tribes. From the tribe identified as market researchers Affinio identified the top 6 hashtags used by this group, with the top 3 bing #marketresearch, #newmr, #mrx. Affinio then found everyone who had used any of these six hashtags on Twitter over a 30 day period. This produced 5.5 thousand people. These people were then segmented into groups, with the largest and most compact group being market researchers. Other interesting groups included Career services/recruiters and Growth hackers/entrepreneurs. One interesting group were Bollywood fans. Analysis by Affinio identified that these were people talking about the Bollywood show MR.X – i.e. a very different use of the […]

Market Research, not a hot topic in Social Media

The fourth contribution to the GreenBook/NewMR Collaborative review of social media research comes from Andrew Jeavons at Mass Cognition. Andrew started by trawling social media for mentions of “market research”, which produced over 7,000 mentions in a 24 hour period. The second phase looked at what else the people making these comments talked about, to generate a context. This second phase produced nearly half a million mentions. The first point that the analysis shows is that the ratio of non-MR to MR mentions, amongst people who mention MR is immense (about 64 non-MR mentions for each MR mention, amongst people who talked about MR). Amongst the other findings in the report are: A decline in the use of the term “market research” over the last ten years The “survey earn money” meme is still strong The term market research seems to be a phrase the wider population understands but does not readily use The MRX community is clearly identifiable, but does not link to the wider community Many of the findings in this report accord with the findings in the other three reports and add further colour and definition. One of the key trends from the project so far is […]

Results of the GreenBook/NewMR Social Media Research Challenge

Stop Press! The review of this project by Ray Poynter and Lenny Murphy is now ready, access it by clicking here.   Back in May GreenBook and NewMR set a challenge to the research industry to show how social media research could be used to generate research findings and insight. We have started publishing the reports and you can access them from the links below. If you have results that you have not shared with us yet, please feel free to do so, provided they meet the criteria of this project, which is broadly: “To use social media research to look at market research (the profession, the industry, and the broader perceptions of it), and to do so as an example of the sorts of benefits social media research can offer.” Project Specification Market Research is too inward looking – Bakamo Social Social Media Research Reveals Market Research Concerns – Susan Bell Research Contrasting the social media MR picture in English, French, and Italian – TNS Market Research, not a hot topic in Social Media – Mass Cognition Who else is talking about market research? – Affinio Listening to talk about Beacons – emprica Once all of the reports have been […]

Contrasting the social media MR picture in English, French, and Italian

This is the third post that relates to the GreenBook/NewMR collaborative evaluation of social media research. This post relates to analysis conducted by TNS. At the bottom of this post is a link to the other posts in the series. Click here to access the full report from TNS. A large proportion of the reports on social media focus on English language contributions, so one of the interesting features of the TNS report is that it looks at three languages (English, French and Italian) and identifies messages they have in common and messages that are different. The report illustrates the processes required to clean data before it becomes information, and the difference between information and knowledge. For example, in the French data the initial query (based on terms like ‘sondage’) produced over 1.5 million instances. However, filtering those for relevance to market research reduced it to just under 10,000. The data also showed that there are about 25 times as many relevant social media posts in English as in French and Italian. The role of Twitter in social media conversations about Twitter varied from about three-quarters of all market research relevant mentions in French to about one-fifth in Italian. The […]

Social Media Research Reveals Market Research Concerns

This is the second post that relates to the GreenBook/NewMR collaborative evaluation of social media research. This post relates to analysis conducted by Susan Bell Research. At the bottom of this post is a link to the other posts in the series. Click here to access the full report from Susan Bell Research. A Qualitative Approach Sue Bell adopted a qualitative approach to investigating what market research clients were revealing about their relationship with market research suppliers in social media. Qualitative research seemed appropriate because the available volume of market research clients is relatively small (making quantification problematic) and because Sue wanted to dig deeper than a comparison of numbers would allow. The analysis is based on 10 users of research, taking comments that have been published in publicly accessible places to minimise ethical and privacy issues. People not familiar with qualitative research may well be surprised at the depth of analysis that can be conducted on a small group, when conducted by a suitably experienced qualitative researcher. To inform not replace In terms of what clients want from agencies the research suggested a complex picture of slightly contradictory desires. Clients want research to help them make better decisions, not […]

Eleven Things Research Pros Should Know about Sentiment Analysis

Guest post by Seth Grimes. Seth Grimes is an analytics strategy consultant with Washington DC based Alta Plana Corporation. He is founding chair of the Text Analytics Summit (2005-13), the Sentiment Analysis Symposium (next event July 15-16, 2015 in New York), and the LT-Accelerate conference (November 25-26, 2015 in Brussels). Sentiment analysis has been portrayed, variously, as a linchpin of the New MR and as snake oil that produces pseudo-insights that are little better than divination. Who’s right? Me, I’m with the first camp. Automated sentiment analysis, powered by text analytics, infuses explanatory power into stale Likert-reliant methodologies and allows researchers to stay on top of fast emerging trends, and to tap the unprompted voice of the customer, via social listening. I suspect that most in the second, nay-sayer camp have distorted ideas of sentiment analysis capabilities and limitations. These ideas have perhaps been engendered by extravagant and unsupported claims made by less-than-capable solution providers. Whatever their source, I’ve take it on myself to debunk them, to give a truer sense of the technology. We aim to encourage appropriate use of sentiment technologies and to discourage their misuse. Call the effort market education. I do a lot of it, via […]

Market Research is too inward looking – Social Media analysis by Bakamo Social

As part of the NewMR/GreenBook Social Media project Bakamo Social have produced an analysis that looks at the differences between the market research industry and two other comparable industries, Management Consultants and Advertising. Click on the image below to read the report. The key finding from the Bakamo analysis is that Market Research is highly interconnected, but insufficiently connected externally. The analysis highlights the tendency for market researchers to do things, particularly on Twitter, that are of interest to other market researchers, but of little interest to the wider business community. One of the key observations in the report is “Convincing each other that we are brilliant might be pleasurable, but certainly it’s not good for the future of our business – this seems to come naturally to us researchers. But we must pierce our bubble and start engaging with the real world: we need to heal ourselves. ” Of course, many of you will say that you knew that already, but the benefit of the Bakamo study is that it is based on evidence and is able to provide an estimate of the scale of the difference between MR and the way the other two sectors connect externally. The […]