#MRX MRA IMRO SMR Guidelines #5 Responsibilities: The Conversition Commentary

December 16, 2010 | Comments Off

MRA recently released version 1 of the MRA/IMRO Guide to the Top 16 Social Media Research Questions, a tool to help newcomers and vendors communicate with each other about this new datasource and method. Conversition was a key contributor to this document which is now available on the MRA website.
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This blog is #5 in a series of 16, each one addressing Conversition’s viewpoint on one of the items in the guidelines. We welcome your questions and comments, and look forward to further discussions on this exciting new trend in the market research industry.
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Alvimann from morguefile
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Within businesses and organizations, how will SMR activities be tracked and aggregated, and whose responsibility is it to handle each of those functions?

This seemingly innocuous question has huge punch behind it. It first requires one to distinguish between social media research and other uses of social media data such as customer relationship management and public relations.

First, each use of social media data requires different skills. Those who intend to use it for social media research need to be knowledgeable about and skilled in such things as sampling, weighting, standards, norms, and scaling. These are industry specific skills that are learned over time through education and practice, and cannot just be picked up casually. As such, if you plan to use social media data for research purposes, make sure you have a researcher on hand who can filter out the noise of monitoring and filter in the science of research.

Second, users taking a research point of view towards the data must understand the ethics associated with that use of the data. Remember, as researchers, we have agreed to respect requests for privacy from our research contributors whether they are participating in surveys, focus groups, or social media research. Though the gathering of social media data brings with it links to an individual’s facebook, twitter, or youtube page, this does not give researchers the unequivocal right to contact and engage with people. This perspective is completely different than that taken by the CRM and PR business so there is definitely room for error and misunderstanding here. Fortunately, numerous professional groups are attempting to work through this issue including the MRA IMRO team.

In the end, as long as you remember to involve people with the right skills and solid ethical considerations, you will be on the right path.
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Related links

MRA IMRO Guide #1: Advantages and Disadvantages of SMR
MRA IMRO Guide #2: Datasources of SMR
MRA IMRO Guide #3: Data Fusion and SMR
MRA IMRO Guide #4: Reliability of SMR

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