#MRA_FOC Live Blogging by Conversition’s Annie Pettit

Sunday, October 31st, 2010

The MRA First Outlook Conference is from November 2 to 4 in Orlando, Florida this year. Our very own Annie Pettit will be live blogging the event so stay tuned to her LoveStats blog for all the highlights. You will also be able to catch her blog on the MRA website.
.
In addition, Annie will be joining Patrick Glaser of the MRA and Jim Longo of iTracks in a panel discussion about the newly released MRA IMRO Social Media Research Guide. Annie was instrumental in developing the guidelines and is excited to discuss them with social media research skeptics, fans, and experts alike.
.
We look forward to seeing each of you there!

Boo!

Friday, October 29th, 2010

MRA IMRO Social Media Research Guide has arrived!

Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

The MRA has just announced the release of the much anticipated document. With contributions from Annie Pettit and other market research experts, it was a journey of a couple of months to get it to this point and it will continue to evolve in future iterations. You can download the document here.

We highly encourage you to download and review the document, but in the meantime, here are a couple points of particular note:

• Best practices call for researchers to respect the coded crawling terms of every Web site they visit. Where Web sites are coded to indicate that crawling is not permitted, those Web sites should not be crawled even if it is technically possible. Researchers must not join Web sites under the pretense of being a member so that they then have access to crawl a Web site that prohibits such crawling otherwise – this condition holds for both automated and manual crawling. Where researchers do join groups, they must immediately make it explicit that they are there for the purposes of marketing research.
• Validity refers to the degree to which results reflect truth or reality while reliability reflects the degree to which results can be replicated if someone else were to conduct a similar study. Because research suppliers have different methods, standards of quality, and processing rules, research consumers must conduct their own validity and reliability analysis of any potential supplier to ensure the quality of work is sufficient. As with all types of marketing research, the validity and reliability of social media research varies greatly.

We’ d love to hear your thoughts.

Online Opinions of Candidates in the Toronto Mayoral Election 2010

Monday, October 25th, 2010

In Toronto Canada, today is the last day to vote for the City of Toronto mayor, a race that is mainly between Rob Ford and George Smitherman. Given that Toronto holds about 8% of the population of Canada and both candidates have raised eyebrows in one way or another, this is an extremely important vote. Let’s have a look at the types of words and phrases the online community uses when they’re talking about each candidate in a positive way and in a negative way. [Larger fonts mean that the phrase is used more often.]

Based on the types of words that are most commonly used, who do YOU think will win this vote?

Positive Conversations about George Smitherman

Positive Conversations about Rob Ford


Negative Conversations about George Smitherman


Negative Conversations about Rob Ford

Voted by YOU to speak at the NewMR Virtual Festival

Wednesday, October 20th, 2010

The first set of speakers has been voted on and among a great set of topics, you have chosen a session by our own Annie Pettit. Many thanks to those who joined in the voting process, and particularly to those who voted for us! We hope to bring you an informative and entertaining session.

And, it’s not too late to participate. You can still submit a poster or video. Visit the New MR virtual festival to find out more.

Mr Survey Flirts with Ms Social Media Research
Annie Pettit

Once upon a time, Mr Survey was going about his daily business measuring the quantity and frequency of purchases. But he was lonely and his life had no flavour. He was tired of talking to the same people all the time. While updating his status on his Facebook page, he heard about a lovely lady called Ms. Social Media Research. She was new to the scene and seemed so fun and exciting. Mr Survey wanted to know if she was looking for a new and wonderful friendship too. He wondered if she was interested in the same things or if she would bring a whole new perspective to his life. Could she be his perfect match? Could they be each other’s rock and build an amazing future together?

Vote for this session to find out whether Mr Survey and Ms Social Media Research find true love in each other’s arms. Brought to you by @LoveStats of Conversition Strategies.

Is DIY SMR FTW or FTL?

Sunday, October 3rd, 2010

Translation: Is do-it-yourself social media research good (FTW=for the win) or bad (FTL=for the loss)?

DIY research of any sort is a highly contentious topic. Though it offers significant financial savings, those savings can be completely lost if the user doesn’t have significant skills in research design and analysis. Insufficient knowledge about data quality practices will lead to wrong results. Insufficient knowledge about data validation practices will lead to wrong results. Insufficient knowledge about question design, focus group moderating, sampling, weighting, scaling, norms, and many other topics will lead to wrong results. Through training and experience, expert researchers have gained an intimate knowledge of the myriad ways that apparently good data can be contaminated and confounded leading to irrelevant and invalid results.

jdurham from morguefile

The decision about whether to use DIY SMR is no different than the decision to use DIY surveys. The data source may be different, the data may be processed differently, but all of the research methodology that goes into making survey results valid is the same that goes into making social media research valid. (Hey, how come we never talk about DIY focus groups?)
.
What is DIY SMR?
There are different levels of do-it-yourself social media research. In its most simplest form, it can involve an individual manually reading through results from sources such as google, facebook, or twitter and analyzing each conversation one by one. Someone might conduct their own rudimentary sentiment and content analysis to determine the type of emotion and the content of the conversations. Generally, the volume of data is small because of the manual limitations of collecting and coding data.

At its most complicated level, DIY SMR involves using a third party source such as an SSR feed to collect the data, and possibly gaining access to a scoring system. A larger quantity of data can be analyzed this way.

If we put aside all of the issues concerning research quality, DIY SMR might work for you if:

• you are interested in the flavor of online conversations
• you want to discover new ideas
• you want some ideas to beef up a survey
• small sample sizes are sufficient
• you don’t require precision or generalizability
• you have significant research experience

.
On the other hand, DIY SMR will not work for you if

• you need precise results
• you need to generalize valid results to a larger population
• you need to compare your results to normative category data
• you need to track your brand results reliably over time
• you need to compare your results to survey and focus group data
• you are inexperienced with research methodologies

.
In the end, you need to make the decision that is right for you and your research objectives. As long as your intent to obtain valid and reliable answers to your SMR objective, you will make the right choice.