RW Connect: Privacy and Ethics in Social Media Research #MRX

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011

Privacy and ethics in social media research continue to attract the attention of established research organizations. Read about ESOMAR’s efforts to contribute to the discussion via a social media research committee that includes Annie Pettit, quoted below.

Privacy and ethics in social media research

Research Challenges & Issues — By Manfred Mareck on February 22, 2011 4:10 pm

“Most consumers are aware that their online conversations could be monitored but a small percentage may not understand that this is the case. A small percent of two billion online users is a lot of people who would be surprised, and possibly embarrassed or offended, that their information is being shared in an arena outside of what they originally intended”, says Annie Pettit, chief research officer at Toronto-based Conversition Strategies and member of the guideline project team. “Whilst ultimately consumers should always protect themselves this is not the ethical standard that market researchers can align themselves with and we must always work diligently on the contributors’ behalf.”

ESOMAR Launches Consultation on Social Media Research Guidelines

Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011

Social media research has grown extremely quickly over the last couple of years necessitating the need for various market research organizations to review the method and provide guidance. After creating a team including Annie Pettit of Conversition Strategies, ESOMAR has developed a draft guideline on social media research. This draft guideline is now publicly available for comment.

Excerpt from ESOMAR website:

“Social media research is a hot new technique for gaining insights that has also attracted significant media attention because of consumer concerns that they are being observed or tracked without their knowledge.

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Spammer techniques worth a steal

Monday, February 7th, 2011

LYNN GREINER, CTV News,Feb 7, 2010

Read the full story here.

Extract from CTV Website:

“Sentiment analysis is another area in which analytics can help. It tells companies how consumers view their brands. It’s not new, but according to Tessie Ting, co-founder of Toronto-based social media research firm Conversation Strategies, techniques have evolved with the emergence of social networking, as researchers harvest Twitter feeds, Facebook posts and forum comments to get spontaneous input from consumers.

“Market researchers have been doing it for years through surveys, using a sample of respondents,” she says. “The difference is we are now using unfiltered, unprompted comments from consumers about products and services they buy and use in their daily lives. However, instead of a few hundred, we deal with millions of data. These comments are collected and edited to ensure quality and validity and then scored for sentiment, negative or positive in a continuum.”

Sentiment scores can be combined with other research to help companies adjust their strategies and address areas most in need of attention. If a brand has a great reputation for everything but customer service, it can work on that weakness before it irreparably damages the brand.”

Conversition Presents the War on Social Media Research Standards at NetGain 5.0

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

What are you doing on January 26, 2011? Well, we’ll be presenting at the NetGain 5.0 conference in Toronto.  Annie Pettit has been invited back to give a brief overview of where the various marketing research organizations stand in terms of developing their own social media research guidelines, as well as to discuss a few of the more controversial topics.

Here is the full schedule of speakers. Annie will be presenting during “Case studies relating to Social Media in the area of Marketing Research“. Her session is titled “The War on Social Media Research Standards” and you will see that it is indeed a war!

Annie will, of course, be tweeting the entire event using the hashtag #NetGain5 so be sure to follow along if you can’t be there in person.

If you’re lucky, there might still be an available seat. Register here and hope to see you there!

Shattering the Two-Way Mirror

Wednesday, December 1st, 2010

Shattering the Two-Way Mirrors by Douglas Quenqua, Wednesday, December 1, 2010, 12:00 AM

The Magazine of Online Media, Marketing, & Advertising

Read the full article here.

Excerpt follows:

“For now, it’s hard to find someone who is doing more to advance social media research than Annie Pettit. Pettit is chief research officer at Conversition Strategies, a boutique research firm based in Toronto, and one of a handful of people working to refine the practice and convince chief marketing officers of its value. Like most true believers, Pettit talks about social research in fatalistic terms. “I’ll stake my life on the fact that this is where research is going,” she says.

But dismiss her as a zealot at your own risk. Pettit, who holds a Ph.D. in experimental psychology and boasts more than 15 years as a practicing researcher (she wrote her dissertation on methods for ensuring the integrity of online research panels), has spent the past two years refining the techniques that have made Conversition the company that Fortune 500 companies go to when they want to mine the social Web for marketing data.

“A lot of companies that do mining collect the data and put it on a dashboard and let you watch as the volume of data goes up and down so you can see who’s saying what,” she says. “We go the next step and do all the sentiment analysis, so we determine if someone is saying something positive or negative or something in between, and we get a range of scores so we can tell you how positive or negative.”

Pettit is also helping develop techniques for divining the answers to classic focus group questions from the content found on social media. This way, companies can not only find out what customers think of their brand, but how those customers might react to changes, or what changes they would like to see. “Traditionally, market researchers care about questions related to buying and intent to purchase,” she says. “We have replicated those same questions on our platform … Today, you could take an online survey and basically map it question by question onto social media research,” she says.

To illustrate the purity of the opinions she commonly receives through her research, Pettit talks about a current project that involved gauging public opinion of a particular actress. People on the social networks she was monitoring “were more than vocal and specific about” their “amorous feelings,” she said. “You would never get that language on a survey.”

It’s an extreme example, but it gets to the heart of social media research’s potential.”

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.

Buzz Session Preview: Social Media Research Guidelines

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

Time is running out! Sign up for today’s preview of the MRA First Outlook Conference session on social media research guidelines. The webinar will highlight some of the issues that have been raised regarding this new methodology and, along with Jim Longo and Ray Poynter, is presented by Annie Pettit, the Chief Research Officer of Conversition Strategies.

Sign up here.

Market Research Debate: Annie Pettit and Ben Smithee Square Off

Thursday, September 16th, 2010

Join the GMOC blog as Annie and Ben debate best practices for incorporating social media with your market research and explore the ultimate question: “Should we engage people online for research?” Click on the image for further details. Anyone hedging their bets on a winner? (We are!)

NewMR Virtual Festival 2010

Friday, September 10th, 2010

If you’ve been following Ray Poynter’s LinkedIn discussion, you’ve seen all the positive feedback he received in response to wondering aloud about a virtual market research conference. And all of those positive comments turned into a brand new conference!

Have you ever been disappointed that your conference budget only permitted 6 conferences per year even though there are 20?
Have you ever had needed to attend two different conferences in two parts of the country during the same week?
What crazy world do you live in?

Well, this is the conference for you! Listen in, present your research, mingle with other professionals without ever changing out of your pajamas and into your business suit! Com’on over and join us at a brand new virtual conference!

Conversition Represents SMR Practitioners on CASRO Social Media Research Task Force

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

CASRO today announced the formation of a social media research task force to address the many ethical and methodological issues developing in the wake of social media research’s emergence. Conversition Strategies is pleased to to represent the voice of SMR practitioners on this task force with participation by Annie Pettit (@LoveStats on Twitter).

Current  members of the task force include:
Jeff Resnick, Global Managing Director, Opinion Research Corporation, Chair of Committee
Duane Berlin, Lev & Berlin, P.C. and CASRO General Counsel
Jeffrey Henning, founder and VP of Strategy at Vovici Corporation
Susan McDonald, CEO of National Analysts Worldwide and 2011 CASRO Board Chair
Annie Pettit, Chief Research Officer of Conversition Strategies
Peter Milla, Technology Consultant for CASRO

CASRO welcomes contributions from all industry representatives. A “Town Hall Meeting” will be held on Wednesday, October 13, 2010 at CASRO’s 35^th Annual Conference in North San Diego. Comments may be sent to smr@casro.org. Other venues for discussion will be announced.

Announcement in Daily Research News
Announcement in Research Live