Professor Pettit praises students, receives apple

August 18, 2010 | Comments Off

What a lovely city Barrie is! From the beautiful lakes, wandering fields, and deathly blades ready to skewer you (check out the Spirit Catcher by Ron Baird, you’ll see), it was a delight to make the trip. I was invited by Neil to speak to his Georgian College research class about social media research from all points theoretical to practical. A two hour class is far too short a time span to talk about everything there is to say but boy did we try!

We managed to cover all of the hot topics. No, geographic data isn’t readily available for social media data. No, demographic data is readily available. No, sentiment analysis isn’t perfect. No, content analysis isn’t perfect. But then if you think about social desirability, leading questions, horribly long grids, nonrandom samples, and self-selection biases, there are lots of drawbacks to other forms of market research too. It all comes down to choosing the right method for your purpose, understanding the pros and cons of the method you’ve chosen and using that method wisely.

As such, we also managed to cover lots of the good stuff too. Even if you don’t have a social media presence, you can do social media research using competitor data and category data. You can gather thousands and millions of opinions from people who might have never answered a survey before. You can measure thousands of variables that would never have fit on a survey or as part of a focus group. You can discover strange new uses for your product. You can see the real language people use to talk about your product, not the cleaned up for church, no swear words version. You can measure variables backwards in time even if you just created the variable today.

We also learned that if you participate in class, you might be invited to join an offline social network,  Silly Bandz, even if you aren’t on Twitter. I have only 9 left…

I hope you all did well on your 3 hour exam, even if your computer did freeze at the very end of it. (My deepest sympathies to you!)

Thanks for inviting me, thanks for the delicious homemade cookies, and thanks for the apple!

I wish the best of luck to each one of you in your job searches. May they be short and fruitful.

Annie

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