British Petroleum, Brad Pitt, Blood Pressure, or Basis Points?

July 6, 2010 | Comments Off

Unlike other types of research, social media research has the potential to provide brands with millions of relevant datapoints. That is, of course, as long as sufficient work is put into gathering the right data. What exactly is the right data? If you do Google “BP,” about 200 million records will be found. And given the severity around the situation in the Gulf, the first few hundreds of pages are all about British Petroleum. We carefully gathered thousands of records that specifically related to British Petroleum and created a quick word cloud of the types of companies that were mentioned. Not surprising, energy and finance companies were top of the list.

However, just two months ago, if you had googled “BP,” chances are you would have returned very different data. Perhaps it would have been about Brad Pitt or Basis Points or Blood Pressure, who’s to say? Well, we created a second word cloud that was based on sloppy data collection. Any mention of BP in social media was collected regardless of the context. As you can see in the cloud, BP most commonly stands for Blood Pressure. This is a huge confound that absolutely must be avoided.

Imagine how the research results would be affected if blood pressure data was included with British Petroleum data. We would be astonished that fishermen were using Zocor to try and calm down after watching Inglourious Basterds.

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