Paradigm Sample™ and Conversition Partner to Deliver Mobile and Social Media Solution

Written on March 3, 2011 at 6:57 pm, by Conversition Team

Paradigm Sample™ and Conversition Partner to Deliver Comprehensive Mobile and Social Media Solutions; Targets Coveted 18-34 Demographic with Smartphone and Social Media

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Paradigm Sample™ and Conversition have delivered mobile and social media data collection to their respective client base. Driving the next wave of innovation, the two companies are partnering to complement their existing product suites with mobile and social media data collection.

(New York, March 3, 2011) – With MobilePulse™, Paradigm Sample™ is able to quickly and accurately gain insight into Consumers and Professionals on a particular topic area whether they poll their own mobile panel or individuals before-after a flight segment, an event or a retail location. “Complementing the data collection capabilities of MobilePulse™ with Conversition’s Evolisten™ and TweetFeel product suite will allow for the immediate application of multiple social media research capabilities like sentiment scoring with direct real-time feedback from Mobile data collection,” said Tessie Ting, Co-Founder of Conversition.

“Our focus has always been to deliver innovative market research solutions to our end clients.” noted Sima Vasa, CEO, Paradigm Sample™. “That took us into mobile data collection and panel development. To meet immediate client needs, we’re partnering with Conversition to apply their thought leadership around Social Media Research for a more comprehensive solution for our clients.” Paradigm Sample™ and Conversition deliver products that provide a great complement to the in-depth research provided by full-service market research partners. For more information on these offerings contact us at info(at)paradigmsample(dot)com.

About Paradigm Sample™
Paradigm Sample™, an innovative global sample company based in Port Washington, NY, uses a consultative approach with clients to meet their end-to-end sample needs. They specialize in hard-to-reach audiences and are experienced in online and mobile panels. They represent an exclusive panel (North America, Europe, and Asia), and provide even broader access through a global network of over 260 sample partners. They are driving mobile panel development and data collection innovation with MobilePulse™, their real-time data collection capability. Management Science Associates, Inc. (MSA) and Paradigm Sample™ have also launched Convenience Consumer Insights Panel (cci Panel), the consumer research field’s first mobile panel designed to capture sales information from hard-to-reach younger shoppers within the convenience store channel. Paradigm Sample™ has sustained double-digit quarter over quarter growth since its inception in early 2009.

About Conversition Strategies
Conversition is a data collection company based in Centerport NY and Toronto, Canada that specializes in social media research. What is social media research? Social media research is the application of scientific marketing research principles to the collection and analysis of social media data such that valid and reliable results are produced. Their technology allows them to listen to consumers and applies scientific research principles to the collection and analysis of social media data. Their strength lies in their extensive market research experience and understanding of the social media landscape. Their services are complementary to traditional market research methodologies and help you gain a more holistic view of how people engage in conversation regarding your product, service or brand.

Join Us at the NewMR Virtual Festival – Listening is the New Asking #MRX

Written on February 24, 2011 at 9:34 am, by Conversition Team

We are pleased to once again be presenters at a NewMR virtual festival! This virtual event looks at different aspects of buzz listening, blog monitoring, and computer assisted qualitative data analysis. You can read more about the event here.

The Event will be held as three two-hour sessions, each session being targeted at a different time zone. Annie Pettit will be speaking at the end of the third session which is 3pm to 5pm New York Time (EST) or 8pm to 10pm (GMT). .

Annie Pettit, PhD is the Chief Research Officer of Conversition Strategies. She has more than 15 years of experience as an online market researcher and specializes in data quality and social media research. Annie is a member of the CASRO, MRA, and ESOMAR social media research committees. Annie was previously the VP of Online Panel Analytics at Ipsos. Her expertise in research methods and data quality has been highlighted through numerous conference presentations, including ARF, CASRO, MRA ,MRIA, NetGain, and IIR. She has also published numerous articles in both professional and refereed magazines and journals.

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Presentation Summary

Quick and Dirty or Slow and Careful: Social Media Data Speaks

Social media research seems like a quick and easy solution to surveys. The data is instantly available to anyone whether you are a researcher and whether you have access to any specialized tools. But, this paper will demonstrate, with real data, how your research results can be negatively affected if you don’t take care at various stages of the research process. We will evalute how results are affected when care isn’t taken to develop the initial search set, to create the variables being measured,  and to select the websites being reviewed.

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

Written on February 23, 2011 at 10:16 am, by Conversition Team

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

Written on February 22, 2011 at 8:52 am, by Conversition Team

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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Related links
Social media monitoring vs social media research: Can you see the difference?
The Conversition Hierarchy of Social Media Insight
Coke it is! Or not. I’m not sure. I can’t tell.
Apple pie, Apple orchard, Apple cider, or Apple iPad
Battle of the Brands: Blackberry vs iPhone

Spammer techniques worth a steal

Written on February 7, 2011 at 11:09 am, by Conversition Team

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

Written on January 6, 2011 at 11:26 am, by Conversition Team

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

Written on December 1, 2010 at 12:21 pm, by Conversition Team

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!

Written on October 27, 2010 at 2:15 pm, by Conversition Team

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

Written on September 28, 2010 at 9:03 am, by Conversition Team

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

Written on September 16, 2010 at 11:32 am, by Conversition Team

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!)