#MRX MRA IMRO SMR Guidelines #6: Social Media Research Skills

December 17, 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 #6 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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What additional knowledge, skills and abilities will a corporate researcher need to learn in order to improve their level of competency with SMR?

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The leap from traditional survey and focus group skills to social media research skills is not necessarily a very large one. Many traditional skills, including sampling, weighting, norms, scaling, handling bias, accounting for statistical assumptions, and other key topics of marketing research are directly relevant and remain essential. The basic skills required of researchers are completely unchanged.

There are, of course, nuances and in this respect, researchers who have specialized in qualitative methods may find themselves slightly ahead of the game. Most qual researchers already have a good understanding of sentiment analysis and content analysis as these are essential components of the focus group, personal interview, and observational research methods. Qual researchers who already have extensive experience in manual versions of sentiment and content analysis may find they need to become more familiar with the slight differences of their automated equivalents including how grammatical errors, slang, and other normally only-human-understood elements are interpreted.

Researchers who have chosen to specialize in the quantitative side of things will have to take a larger leap. In fact, quantitative researchers are familiar with sentiment analysis but it is normally presented in the form of Likert scales where responders slot their opinions into pre-specified boxes such as “Strongly Agree“ or “Somewhat Disagree“. In the social media research case, however, quant researchers will need to spend some time learning about the processes for placing opinions into those Likert scale boxes on behalf of the responder (sentiment analysis). And, where quantitative researchers are used to creating categories of topics via a survey to which responders then provide an answer, they will have to learn how to reverse engineer that process. Thus, they will have to learn how to read an opinion and assign it to specific questions or categories such as “How likely are you to purchase this item?”  on behalf of the responder (content analysis).

If you keep your eyes open, you’ll notice just how familiar you already are with this thing called social media research.
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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
MRA IMRO Guide #5: Responsibilities of Social Media Data Users

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