Red Binder vs. Blue Binder: Hits and Misses of the Second Romney Obama Debate

October 17, 2012 | Comments Off

If you watched last night’s second presidential debate, you probably had a little chuckle or sigh of disappointment when you walked into your office this morning and saw the dusty binders on your shelf. Binders full of women aside, let’s take a look at the highs and lows of the debate.

In this analysis, we focused only on social media verbatims that mentioned either Obama or Romney during the last 24 hours. Verbatims that mentioned both candidates were not included.

First of all, you can see that the most common topics for social media users to focus on included choice, recommending, political issues, anger, and appreciation.

If you look a little further down the list to see which specific issues social media users focused on, you will see family, employment, religion, Libya, schooling, and the military. Apparently the environment and the TransCanada pipeline weren’t attention grabbers for the social media crowd.

You can also see that for the most part, the most common topics mentioned by people talking about Obama were also the most common topics mentioned by people talking about Romney. The only differentiator was that people talking about Obama were more likely to focus on generic emotional (36% vs 26%) and personality (32% vs 16%) topics.

However, the second chart shows that when it comes to opinions about the topic itself, opinions were all over the place.

In the eyes of social media, Romney was the clear winner when it came to employment (52% positive), religion (46% positive), and education (70% positive). Romney conversations were very much focus on very specific issues.

On the other hand, Obama was the clear winner when it came to recommendations (46% positive), appreciation (45% positive), family (19% positive), elections (40% positive), and Binders of Women (65% positive). Again, Obama conversations tended to be less focused on issues, and more focused on a personal evaluation.

Based on the social media buzz of yesterday and this morning, Obama has a very slight lead among social media users. The distinction between Obama’s personal likeability and Romney’s issue based focus puts Obama at 24.5% positive and 30.7% negative while Romney stands at 20% positive and 28.4% negative. With less than a month to go, there is no clear winner as of today nor as a result of the second debate.

If Binders of Women is puzzling to you, do a quick internet search for it. Memes started to spring up during the debate and they still haven’t stopped. I’ve shared my favourite one here!

CASRO Webinar: Social Media Guidelines and Regulations

October 15, 2012 | Comments Off

If you are conducting online social media research, such as MROCs or social media listening, you may not be aware of all current regulations, in the US and internationally, that apply to this work. If you are doing such work or contract other firms to do it on your behalf, it is wise to be knowledgeable of the regulations and guidelines currently in place and those on the horizon.

This webinar will update researchers on current regulations, as well as the CASRO Code of Standards and CASRO Social Media.

Topics will include:

Current Regulation

• FTC Privacy Policy Enforcement Actions
• Violation of Website Terms of Use
• EU Data Protection Directive

CASRO/ESOMAR Guidelines

• Social Media Listening
• Communities

Industry Specific Considerations

• Pharmaceuticals
• Other Regulated Industries

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Biting the hand and bending the rules at the IJMR Research Methods Forum

October 12, 2012 | Comments Off

On Wednesday November 7th, in London England, the IJMR Research Methods Forum will reflect the increasingly challenging and dynamic world of information collection and interpretation facing all stakeholders in research today – whether in the commercial, social or public sectors; practitioners, academics or clients.

Annie Pettit will be a keynote speaker at the event. (She is particularly looking forward to “Tea” at 3:25.) Her session topic is sure to be controversial:

“Biting the hand and bending the rules: How standards are essential and will put you out of business”

You can register for the event here.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Read Annie’s award-winning paper!

October 5, 2012 | Comments Off

Congrats to our own Annie Pettit, who won the David K. Hardin Memorial Award for the best article or paper, based on innovativeness of the research, its usefulness and applicability for other researchers, and the potential societal or economic benefits or implications of the research, published in Marketing Research in 2011.

You can download the winning paper, “The Promises and Pitfalls of SMR,” which was published last September, from our Resources page. Here’s the abstract:

Social media research holds a great deal of promise for those who can tap into its tremendous potential. As this article points out, it is likely to succeed in areas such as tracking research, campaign research, usage and attitude research, and segmentation research. Like any new methodology, however, SMR it has its share of perils and disappointments. Despite some unresolved issues with data reliability and quality, the science of SMR seems destined to prevail.

Congratulations again, Annie!

QRCA in Montreal: Finding the needle in the social media haystack

October 4, 2012 | Comments Off

Social Media Listening: Finding the Needle in the Haystack
Presenter: Annie Pettit, Ph.D.

Social media research is a massively popular methodology right now, enjoying a giant uprise in awareness and interest. But for all that popularity, there is a need for guidance on how to conduct this type of research with the highest level of validity. First, we will demonstrate how to find the right data from which to generate hypotheses. The Internet is a plethora of spam, advertisements, marketing messages, and consumer opinions but only a portion of that data will actually suit the research objectives of any particular study. Second, we will demonstrate how social media listening data can be used to inform and direct other research methods such as traditional survey data, focus group data, and the broader range of qualitative methods.

If you weren’t able to attend, don’t worry! Here are the slides. It’s not as good as in person, but we’re sure you’ll find some useful tidbits.

NFL Brand Takes a Hit in Social Media

September 26, 2012 | Comments Off

What’s worse than no football season? A football season with bad refs.
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Let’s take a look at sentiment towards the NFL and football referees over the last year.  The NFL (red line) generated thousands upon thousands of social media conversations. At least 30% of those conversations were positive, and more and more have been positive over the year. At least until September, that is. On the other hand, the poor referees haven’t been in the good books all year with no more than 19% of messages about them being positive. And, they took a big hit in June and July when fewer than 8% of social media conversations were positive.

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But if we look just at daily conversations since September 1st, and particularly since yesterday when massive errors in refereeing took place, everything changed. While people chatting on social media continue to be just as unhappy with the refs, now they are also extremely unhappy with the NFL. The percentage of conversations about the NFL that were positive dropped drastically from around 40% to only 20%. That’s a massive decline that won’t make for an easy rebound. The NFL had better have a good plan to get themselves out of that hole.

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So what exactly are people saying about the replacement referees? If we look at just the kinds of words and phrases people used when they talked about referrees over the last two days, the words really aren’t all that mean. People are disappointed, they think people ought to be embarrassed, and they feel the whole situation is a disgrace and a blow to integrity of the sport. But hiring unqualified employees isn’t really the fault of the employees.

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Who’s fault is it? Certainly, the NFL’s fault. I’d like to tell you what kinds of words and phrases people used when they talked about the NFL but my mother told me to never say those words. I’m sure you can read them but please don’t read them out loud.

Romney vs. Obama: A daily fight

September 24, 2012 | Comments Off

The crunch has begun and the race is exceptionally close.  Though Obama is generally leading over Romney when social media opinions are compared, the race gets tighter every day. Today, Obama is in the lead, tomorrow…. it’s hard to say. Stay tuned for the newest numbers.

Word of the Day for Chick-Fil-A

September 18, 2012 | Comments Off

Barely two months ago, Chick-Fil-A burst onto the social media scene with a flurry of activity. Here are the top words of the day on July 18 followed by the top words of the day on September 14. Notice any differences?

The iPhone 5: Big deal or big disappointment? #MRX

September 13, 2012 | Comments Off

Using only the information in this chart showing daily mentions of the iPhone 5 in social media, I challenge you to tell me when Apple announced the newest iPhone. There can be no double that September 12, 2012 was the big day, precipitated by the announcement of an announcement just the week before.

As you can see, reaction was swift, but reaction alone tells you nothing about whether people were excited and happy or annoyed and disappointed. So let’s take a quick peek at what people had to say about this upcoming release.

First of all, a handy dandy word cloud is a quick way to get a sense of overall emotions. Impatience and excitement were the words of the day though a few people had some less than nice things to say.

What do people think of the features? Are they happy with how the apps will work? Happy with the memory? The battery life? The camera? Here are a few pie charts showing the percentages of people who had good things, bad things, or neutral things to say about each feature. It looks like mobile apps won this round.

And are people prepared to buy? Are they looking forward to the iPhone 5 with anticipation, eager to recommend, ready to buy, happy to wait? In this case, even though people aren’t happy about the wait, anticipation is leading the field!

There must be a whole lot of fanbois and fangirlz out there with their fingers eagerly playing with their wallets because that is a ton of greenly goodness!

Google Doodle Hits and Misses: Social media opinions of tiny artwork #MRX

September 12, 2012 | Comments Off

You know you love them.

Google continually comes up with creative, hilarious, ridiculous, and downright amazing doodles. You probably have your favourites, and maybe the recent Star Trek doodle is among them, but are they the same as everyone else’s?  Have a peek through this chart to find out which doodles generated the most conversations (the longest blue bars) and which ones generated the most love (the longest green bars).

At the bottom of the page you’ll see the winners and losers. Surprised? Let us know!

You can see all the original doodles in the archives here.

Most Loved: Eadweard J. Muybridge’s 182nd Birthday. A moving image based on static images.

Least Loved: Ruby Payne-Scott’s 100th Birthday: El Boringo!

Most chatted about: Robert Moog’s 78th Birthday: Play the synthesizer yourself!

Least chatted about: Alexander Grin’s 132nd Birthday; El Boringo!