Conversition Represents SMR Practitioners on CASRO Social Media Research Task Force

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

CASRO today announced the formation of a social media research task force to address the many ethical and methodological issues developing in the wake of social media research’s emergence. Conversition Strategies is pleased to to represent the voice of SMR practitioners on this task force with participation by Annie Pettit (@LoveStats on Twitter).

Current  members of the task force include:
Jeff Resnick, Global Managing Director, Opinion Research Corporation, Chair of Committee
Duane Berlin, Lev & Berlin, P.C. and CASRO General Counsel
Jeffrey Henning, founder and VP of Strategy at Vovici Corporation
Susan McDonald, CEO of National Analysts Worldwide and 2011 CASRO Board Chair
Annie Pettit, Chief Research Officer of Conversition Strategies
Peter Milla, Technology Consultant for CASRO

CASRO welcomes contributions from all industry representatives. A “Town Hall Meeting” will be held on Wednesday, October 13, 2010 at CASRO’s 35^th Annual Conference in North San Diego. Comments may be sent to smr@casro.org. Other venues for discussion will be announced.

Announcement in Daily Research News
Announcement in Research Live

So you’ve been told to do something with social media

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

But nobody told you what. Social media is still a brand new arena for many companies. Some are just figuring out that having a Facebook account and maybe even a Twitter account is a good thing. And if these tools are new to you, trying to get a grasp on what more there is to do with social media can be an overwhelming task. Have no fear though. Here are four different things you can do.

Photo credit: clarita from morguefile.com

1) Public Relations: Social media is a great tool for communicating with the general public. Your Facebook page and your Twitter account let you have one to one conversations with people about your brand and products. Consumers – people – have fun reading postings, liking posts, and getting to learn more about who you are as a brand. And, anyone can quickly and easily jump on this wagon. This is the most popular use for social media.

2) Customer Relationship Management: Companies that are a little more savvy can build on their PR initiatives with this component. Tools like Facebook and Twitter can be used not just for general communications, but to respond to consumer questions and solve consumer problems. It’s easy enough for people to send a Facebook message or Tweet to you asking specific questions. If you’re ready to respond to them, with speed and friendliness, then this could be right for you. Companies like Dell and Comcast have Twitter accounts set up just for this and people take full advantage of them.

3) Social Media Monitoring: This use of social media takes a step away from the individual consumer to look at the wider space of the internet. Monitoring is a way for a brand to stay on top of who is saying what about your brand. The goal isn’t necessarily to communicate with individual people, but rather  to have an ear open to anyone speaking about your brand, to watch when and why the volume of conversations increases and decreases, to see what reactions are when good or bad things happen around your brand.

4) Social Media Research: For those of you wishing to expand your survey or focus group research beyond the asking and into the listening, this is the option for you. Social media research uses all of the same scientific principles as traditional research but focuses on social media as the data source rather surveys or focus groups as the source of data. Research objectives, sampling, weighting, standardized variables, norms, generalizability, and validity are the words of the day here.

In the end, you must decide on your objective. Do you want a communication channel for your consumers? Do you want to actively seek questions and solve problems? Do you want to listen to the ebb and flow of the internet? Do you have specific research problems you need to solve? You may not have the time or the budget to delve into every area but one of them probably meets a need you’re currently trying to fill.

Answer that question, and the next step is easy. Well, maybe not easy, but at least you’ve chosen a fork in the road.

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Related links
Social media monitoring vs social media research: Can you see the difference?
Coke it is! Or not. I’m not sure. I can’t tell.
How important is sampling? Well, how important is gay marriage?

Handling Social Media – Part 2: The Understanding

Friday, August 13th, 2010

By Fernando, Lead Evolisten Engineer

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So, you think you can handle Social Media? Great! Now what?

Well, let’s start at the beginning. What specifically is Social Media? Bypassing the fancy definitions, we can say that it’s a bunch of people coming together to talk and stuff, but not in person. The communication takes place through some sort of technological thingy, usually the Internet. The obvious examples are the ones that everyone has heard about, like facebook, twitter and all the other usual suspects (they’re only the tip of the iceberg by the way).

So, you have decided to start with twitter. You create an account and jump in to see what’s going on in there. You’re going to listen to the people, read their tweets and make everything better! After a while, you will find the first problem: there is a heck of a lot going on twitter. Like really, A LOT! You can read tweets for hours, until your eyes hurt, and get nowhere. Just in there, there are thousands upon thousands of relevant tweets to check out, hidden among millions upon millions of other stuff you don’t care about. And this is just one site. What about other popular sites? What about the whole Internet? You’re going to need some help.

Maybe hiring a couple more guys would be enough? Not really. Hiring a dirty dozen? Not really. Hiring a few thousand people and providing them with training, management and equipment? Maybe that would work, but that sounds awfully expensive. This is not going well.

ppdigital from morguefile

And it gets worse. It’s just not a matter of finding the content and reading it, that’s only the beginning. The real work comes after that. What’s the sentiment of the content? What are they talking about specifically? What’s valuable and what’s spam?

And, what if you really want to do things right and go all researchy on it. What are the demographics of these people? What about sampling and weighting? What about other stuff you don’t even know about? This is a lot of work, and you’re definitely going to need some help. Help with expertise.

Luckily, there’s one positive thing going on for you: we’re in the future! It’s the year 2010, the 21^st century! And we may not have flying cars yet or robot butlers as they promised us, but one thing we do have: information processing power and people who know how to use it. If you’re reading this blog, then you know by now that you’re not the first one to think about taming the Social Media beast. People are out there already doing this, already solving all those problems, and coming up with cold hard numbers and data that you can use to improve things. I know it because I’m one of those people.

It’s a whole new ballgame out there. Things are changing fast. Can you adapt and thrive? It is your choice. The help you need is already out there.

Handling Social Media – Part 1: The Awakening.

Wednesday, July 28th, 2010

By Fernando, Conversition’s Lead Evolisten Engineer

(Our tech team writes too!)

Have you ever complained about something? Or given your honest opinion? Or answered a question? Only to be completely ignored? Because, after all, you’re just one guy, and there’s not much you can do about it.

Here’s another scenario. Was someone listening to you but you weren’t really telling the truth because you were being nice and polite, because you really didn’t care about the subject, because they were expecting an answer, so you just said the first thing that popped into your mind?

No matter how you slice and dice it, it’s not an easy thing for the little guy to be heard.

But, what if you get to speak about something you care about, only when you feel like it, and you don’t have to worry about hurting anyone’s feelings, and you just let it all out. Wouldn’t that be nice? And then you do it again, and again, and again. You share your thoughts with the whole world, nonstop, 24/7, loudly and with brutal honesty. You’re angry, or ecstatic, or surprised, and you let everyone know about it. You will make them know. Well, then you’re probably a really strange person.

But, even if you are this strange person, there is still a bright side. Now, you can’t be easily dismissed. You must be dealt with. You can’t be ignored because ignoring you will not make you go away. And strange people can do  a lot damage when left unattended. You say whatever you want to say, whenever you want, to whomever you want, as loudly as you want. And it feels great.

Photo credit: mzacha from morguefile.com

Back in the real world, there aren’t many people like that, probably because it’s so exhausting. But a task that is too much for just one person can easily be done by a thousand people if they just all pull the same way.

Social Media, the ultimate strange person.

Social Media is honest and blunt and does not stop. It speaks with a thousand different voices, from a thousand different viewpoints, for a thousand different reasons, and it will speak about you. It will tell you exactly what it thinks of you. It will tell everyone exactly what it thinks of you. You may think this is either a good thing or a terrifying thing but, at the end of the day, the fact remains that this is indeed a very real thing. It is happening right now, it has been happening for a while, and it will happen more and more in the future. The little guy is out of the bottle, and he and his millions of friends are merrily typing away telling the world what they feel.

You can ignore social media at your own peril, or you can do something about it. What is going to be?

EvoPlay aims to sell brands on the utility of social media research

Monday, July 26th, 2010

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

Flipboard – The greatest thing since, well, the iPad came out

Thursday, July 22nd, 2010

What product launched barely one day ago? What product is “just an app?” What brand new app can’t keep up with consumer demand after just one day on the market?

It must be Flipboard, a new app for the iPad, an app that promises simplicity in all things from using your social networking tools to reading books and magazines. And so far, the buzz isn’t just the hype of anticipation, it’s the hype of reality.

Conversition gathered thousands of conversations that have happened only within the last few days and analyzed the results. Let’s consider the percentage of opinions that were positive, as opposed to neutral or negative, in respect to a few different measures:
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• 61% positive: Overall, it’s a good app, but if you need to know the specifics, the most common comments are that it’s “amazing,” “awesome,” “brilliant,” and “incredible.”
• 58% positive: The app comes highly recommended. People say it’s the “greatest.” We’re assuming the greatest since the iPad and sliced bread that is.
• 70% positive: The app is “easy,” “effortless,” “straightforward,” and “simple” to use.
• 79% positive: The app is “beautiful,” “sleek” and “very cool” or “really cool.”
• 68% positive: The app is a good ereader.
• 68% positive: The app works well with facebook.
• 65% positive: The app works well with twitter.

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Given this stunning level of positivity, we can’t wait to see what the trend line turns out to be. Are we witnessing the birth of the next amazing piece of software, the iPad of software? Or, is this just a temporary fad fueled by great marketing and social media celebrity endorsements.

Regardless, if you’re looking for an easy application for using twitter and facebook, one that is brilliant, effortless, and sleek, the internet community highly recommends that you try the Flipboard. If you can finagle yourself an invite that is.

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Links that might interest you:
Flipboard on EvoPlay
Flipboard on MediaFile
Flipboard App website
Apple pie, Apple orchard, Apple cider, or Apple iPad

Conversition on Facebook

IMRO guidelines for research based on social media data

Tuesday, July 20th, 2010

A committee has been formed and brainstorming is underway!

With the realization that research using social media data is quickly gaining in popularity, the IMRO division within the MRA has put together a committee to help define and guide users and providers in this space. Over the next couple of months, a team of 17 or so researchers, including Annie Pettit (@LoveStats) of Conversition Strategies, and led by Jim Longo (@LongoMR) of iTracks, will be putting their heads together to build a short document that will be made publicly available.
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The committee will address a number of issues including what is social media research, how should users evaluate it, what are the essential components for consideration, as well as other key topics. The goal is not to provide rules that must be followed but rather to ensure users and providers are aware of all of the issues when considering and conducting social media research.
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Your opinions are important. Share your thoughts, questions and concerns with us by leaving comments here, emailing Annie (LinkIn) or by emailing Jim Longo.