Biting the Hand and Bending the Rules: An IJMR Presentation

Monday, November 12th, 2012

We were delighted to be asked to keynote at the recent IJMR research methods forum in London. In a fabulous setting rich with history, we shared our perspective on a relatively brand new research method. We showed just how detrimental the effects can be when standards are cast aside as well as when standards go too far. If you have any questions about the presentation, do get in touch with us. We can talk for hours about these things!

Conversition Talks Social Media Research at the Canadian House of Commons #MRX

Wednesday, June 6th, 2012

Yesterday was certainly an exciting day for Conversition. Because of our ongoing role in the social media space, we were asked by the MRIA to speak with them when they addressed the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics in Ottawa.

Brendan Wycks, the Executive Director of the MRIA, opened our talk with a discussion of MRIA’s views and desires and I followed with a discussion more focused on social media research. Below is my speech.

*******************************************************************************************

Address to the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics
House of Commons, Ottawa, June 5, 2012
Presented with Brendan Wycks, Executive Director of the MRIA

Thank you everyone for taking the time to meet with us.

As Brendan said, my name is Annie Pettit and I am the Vice President of Research Standards as well as the Chief Research Officer at Conversition, a Canadian market research start-up specializing in social media research. I am an avid social media research tweeter, blogger, and conference presenter, and have recently published a book about social media research which includes a chapter on social media research ethics. Because I am seen as a global thought leader in the social media research space, ESOMAR in Europe, and the Council of American Survey Research Organizations (CASRO) and the Marketing Research Association (MRA), MRIA’s counterparts in the United States, each invited me to be a contributing member of their social media research committees.

To give you a sense of the role that social media research is playing in the market research industry, I’d like to share with you a few results from the Spring 2012 Greenbook Research Industry Trends Report, a survey of over 800 market researchers around the world. Twenty-eight percent of those researchers had used social media research. Fifty-nine percent planned to use social media research in the next year. And more than 10% said that social media research is one of the greatest opportunities for researchers in the future.

Social media research is defined as the application of traditional market research principles to the collection and analysis of social media data for the purpose of better understanding policies and opinions. Just as survey researchers use survey data, social media researchers use social media data. And, we apply the same strict methodological practices to that data. For instance, just as with traditional survey research or focus group research, social media research begins by collecting the right data. Where survey researchers decide which people are best suited to participate in a survey, social media researchers decide which websites or other online forums are best suited for better understanding opinions. We incorporate traditional aspects of market research including sampling, weighting, scaling, norms, and box scores to ensure we measure opinions as accurately as possible.

The main purpose of social media research is to better understand the opinions people have towards policy issues, products and services, celebrities and politicians, social issues and cultural activities. Social media research helps us learn what people like and don’t like so that we can improve the services people receive, create better products, and better serve our constituents.

Most importantly, social media research is not a kinder, gentler word for social media marketing. We do not market products. We do not sell products. We, like our counterparts working in the traditional side of the industry, conduct market research. We abide by and respect the same methodological and ethical guidelines and standards as traditional researchers do.

I’d like to share with you just a few examples of how we abide by those principles.

First of all, we take great care to only collect public data.  Some websites, like Facebook and Linkedin, use passwords to completely hide portions of data from outsiders, including Google. If you were to do a Google search, this data would not be found. Social media researchers do not and in fact, cannot collect this data. Many social media research users expect to see more data coming from Facebook but because much of it is programmed as private, very little is actually released. In some cases, we could just create a password and collect the data. But we don’t. We respect this privacy.

Other websites allow anyone to read the entries. Comments left on YouTube, Flickr, or WordPress are written for strangers to read and enjoy, and can be found via a Google search. The purpose of passwords in these cases is to allow readers to follow the conversation among many different people. This is the type of data that social media researchers collect.

In addition, we depersonalize data that is shared in reports, we do not engage with social media users without their consent, and we do not knowingly collect data from minors.

The internet has evolved rapidly in recent years. Ten years ago, it seemed incomprehensible that the average person would share intimate details of their life online.  Today, bloggers are regular people who get excited when strangers, not their friends and family, read their thoughts and share them widely. Public forums are open social networks where strangers from around the world find and share opinions with each other. Twitter is a newer entrant into the social media space, and for many people using it, the ultimate goal is to write a tweet that millions of people around the world will read. We have reached a stage where social media has become so engrained in our lives that social media users expect companies to respond to social media comments written in an obscure corners of the internet. People expect their social media complaints to be met with letters of apology.

Right now, Canada is one of the global thought leaders in social media research and I’m proud to represent Canada in that role. But, I worry that if we lose this position, if we are unable to compete in the social media research space because our privacy standards restrict us rather than let us self-regulate, that our clients will have to use social media research conducted in countries with less than high ethical standards. That scares me.

Let us be thought leaders. Let us continue to lead in the social media research space. Let’s demonstrate to other countries that social media research can be conducted in a way that is beneficial to the government and corporate decision-makers who seek actionable insights from it; to research companies; and, most of all, to Canadians.

Thank you.

#MRX MRA IMRO SMR Guidelines #9: Legal Issues

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

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.
.
This blog is #9 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.

kconnors from morguefile

.
What are the controversies and legal issues regarding the rights of the people whose data is being used?

This topic is, excuse the formal language, ginormous. As researchers, marketers, and technology providers, people using social media data are still learning about the rights of people who create that data.

Some people feel that because the internet is a public space, anyone can go online and gather data from anywhere, from anyone, for any purpose, even if it takes a couple of minutes to generate a password to access the data. Some people take another extreme and feel that no data should be collected without the explicit permission of the person who has created the data.

The Conversition position falls in the middle.

We believe that password protection signals a desire for privacy. Even if it is possible to create a password and enter a site within a minute, data should not be gathered from the site.

We believe that social media data should not be shared verbatim in research reports. Verbatim comments are easily searchable online and individuals can be quickly and easily identified. Comments which may seem benign to us may be embarrassing or damaging to the person who wrote them, a person who may not have understood which types of data on the internet are and are not public.

We believe that people creating information on the internet should not be engaged with for research purposes until after they have specifically given permission to continue the contact for that purpose.

We believe that the rights of the individual come ahead of the desires of the researcher. Just as surveys and focus groups are created with the safety of the individual in mind, and this means writing non-threatening surveys and finding physically safe focus group locations, so should social media research processes ensure that the safety of the individual comes first.

The legalities of social media data collection and use still need to be determined and they will vary on a country by country basis. But, while the legalities are still being determined and after they are determined, we plan to respect the individual.

.
.
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
MRA IMRO Guide #6: Social Media Research Skills
MRA IMRO Guide #7: Research Contributor Awareness

Observational Research – The Original Research Method

Monday, September 27th, 2010

Market researchers get so caught up in surveys and focus groups that we forget about other well-recognized and legitimate forms of research, two of which are perfect for describing social media research.

First, observational research entails watching people in public, natural environments with no attempts to interfere with or talk to them. In this style of research, people go about their daily lives, doing all the things that they would normally do, and are unaware that they are part of a research study. This method works well when the researcher does not plan to talk to anyone nor pose as a member of group. You can’t ask people about their motivations or to clarify their position, but the behaviour is 100% natural. (This is the type of research that Conversition specializes in.)

Darnok from morguefile

Second, participant observation research also entails watching people in public, natural environments. In this case, the researchers do engage with people but only once the researcher has specifically identified themselves to each person as someone who is conducting research. People who wish to extract themselves from the research process can then do so. Or, they may request that information pertaining to them not be used. If you’re familiar with the Hawthorne effect, then you can see why telling people you are a researcher can be problematic.

Ethical dilemmas are common to many types of research and have been debated for decades. We now all agree that research that has the potential to cause harm or embarrassment is not appropriate. For example, the Zimbardo prison experiment and Milgram shock experiments crossed the line before they even started.

And, we’ve come to agreements on the types of research that are ethical and appropriate. Research that has no potential for harm because the researcher does not intervene, the research takes place in a public place, and the people would expect others to observe them is acceptable. Though the debate is still taking place, social media research falls nicely into this acceptable range. 1) The internet is public and 2) people understand that the internet is public. The only decision for researchers is whether they wish to embrace the participant observation mode (gain permission to talk to each person) or the observation only mode (no contact at all).

Read some of the ethical guidelines of this Panel on Research Ethics and then see where your opinions about observational research fall. We’d love to debate the issues with you!