E-Rewards to buy social media researcher Conversition

11 May 2011 | By Brian Tarran

US— E-Rewards, the parent company of online panel firm Research Now, has agreed a deal to acquire social media research agency Conversition Strategies.

The business was founded in early 2009 by two former Ipsos executives, Jean Davis and Tessie Ting, and its primary product is the EvoListen platform, which collects data from social media sites, cleans and filters it and applies scientific sampling and weighting to report the results, formatted into quantitative data sets.

Read the rest of the Research Live announcement here.

Roxana Strohmenger of Forrester shared some of her thoughts on what Conversition + e-Rewards means. An excerpt of her article follows.

Our Take: What e-Reward’s Acquisition Of Conversition Means For The Market Research Industry

Posted by Roxana Strohmenger on May 11, 2011

Late last night the market research vendor landscape became a little more consolidated with the announcement that e-Rewards reached an agreement to acquire Conversition Strategies. This is not the first, nor probably the last, move that e-Rewards will take in growing a versatile offering in the market research industry. In 2009, e-Rewards, acquired UK-based online panel provider Research Now, which allowed it to become an online panel provider with global reach. And in 2010 e-Rewards acquired Peanut Labs, which enhanced its panel by offering a social media specialty sample that is recruited and surveyed through social and gaming networks. The acquisition of the Conversition platform EvoListen will allow e-Rewards’ clients to listen and analyze, in a market researcher’s terms, what consumers are saying on social media.

This announcement is significant for the market research industry because it:

• Reaffirms that social media is a source for consumer insights. Forrester’s Technographics® data shows that more than 80% of online US consumers regularly use social media. And this high level of engagement is not exclusive to developed markets. Even emerging markets like Brazil and China are voracious consumers of social media. In market research, we need to be where our consumers are, and now more than ever, social media is that channel. What sounds better, access to 6 to 8 million actively engaged online people globally, which is typically what you find with global online panel providers, or access to more than 600 million active online people? With that wide scope of access, it should be a no-brainer that social media is an important channel that we should be using to gather consumer insights.

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Read the rest of the article here.

The article also appears on RW Connect.

After the announcement that E-Rewards would be acquiring Conversition, the Greenbook blog posted an article discussing the possible implications for the research industry. An extract follows.
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The Great Conjunction: What the e-Rewards and Microsoft Acquisitions Mean

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One of my favorite movies as a kid (well, really it still is!) is the classic Jim Henson fantasy “The Dark Crystal”. Filled with pseudo-mystical profundities of various sorts, one central element was the race to have certain players in the drama in place before the stars aligned in the “Great Conjunction”, when magical things would happen. Well, we’re seeing our own version of the Great Conjunction occur now, exemplified by the e-Rewards acquisition of Conversition Strategies and the Microsoft purchase of Skype.

The Conversition acquisition positions e-Rewards to converge social media data with traditional research to form a compelling offering based on integrating these two complementary data sources. I am certain that they are also working on a mobile offering, and when they announce that they will have three of the primary channels of consumer insight collection together: The Great Conjunction for market research.

Read the rest of the article here.

From Research Live
By Brian Tarran
July 26, 2010

Excerpt:

“Social media may be a big hit with consumers, but brands are not entirely sold yet on the potential of social media research – a state of affairs Conversition is hoping to change with a new data visualisation app.

The social media research agency today launched EvoPlay to encourage brand owners to explore the type of data available to them via the web.

Co-founder Tessie Ting said “there is still a lot of reluctance” to the idea of using data from blogs, forums and social networks – what the company refers to as “social media data” – in place of the more traditional market research data sets.”

Click here for the rest of the story

Excerpt from features section of Research-Live, by Brian Tarran.
Friday April 16, 2010

“It is a school of thought seemingly embodied by the agency Conversition, which describes itself as a social media research company, as distinct from social media monitoring and social media analysis. “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,” says the agency’s website.

What this means in practice is that Conversition produces similar outputs to a traditional market research agency, only it sources its data from the social web rather than through surveys. There are some limitations to the approach. Brand or product awareness is impossible to measure, says chief research officer Annie Pettit, explaining that just because someone doesn’t mention a brand in an online conversation doesn’t mean they are unaware of it.

Otherwise, Conversition has most of the basic tracking measures covered. And, says Pettit, it’s wholly possible to use the company’s data to create working predictive models – and why wouldn’t you? “That is the whole purpose of market research,” she says.”

TweetFeel has received a lovely welcome by the internet world. Here are just a few of the mentions from the last day or two.

TweetFeel gives instant brand feeling

by Dan Leahul, Brand Republic 14-Jul-09, 11:15
LONDON – TweetFeel, a new Twitter application which allows marketers to instantly gather the overall sentiment of their brands, has gone live as use of the microblogging website continues to surge after slowing slightly last month.

The Washington Post Publishes tweetfeel Review

Published July 13, 2009

TechCrunch Reviews tweetfeel

by Robin Wauters on July 13, 2009
TweetFeel is a new web service by marketing research startup Conversition Strategies that combines real-time search for Twitter with sentiment detection algorithms. The idea is for people to use TweetFeel to run search queries for products, celebrities, companies, brands etc. and thus get a notion of what the average Twitter user thinks of them in a matter of seconds…

Research Live Reviews tweetfeel

Published July 13, 2009
Social media research agency Conversition has developed a website through which people can search Twitter for mentions of brands, celebrities and products, and to see whether the tweets are positive or negative….

Mashable Reviews tweetfeel

By Adam Ostrow, July 13, 2009
TweetFeel is a new Twitter search tool along the same lines, but instead of showing one or the other, gives you a numerical score as to how positive or negative tweets are about a given topic. Its analysis is based not just on emoticons, but also words and phrases…