Blackbeardblog

Is there an ethics of de-friending? How often do social network users “purge” their friends, groups, apps? I’d really like to know more about these topics – they have implications for marketers, in that if (say) you’ve persuaded users to install an app, you want to have some notion of that app’s useful lifespan; how quickly the interest curve decays.

My hunch is that purges don’t happen very often – partly because networks don’t really encourage users to do it (it’s quite hard to defriend someone on Facebook!), partly because of inertia. The main motivator of app and group purging is surely clutter, but a lot of stuff will just get ignored: I’m sure most people have lots of “zombie apps” lurking around. Read the rest of this entry »

Researchers have always had a lot to say about the importance of trust in a consumer marketplace – mostly in the context of brand values and other intangibles. Trust is also one of the roots of the current recession: a lack of trust between financial institutions which led to the seizing up of many lending mechanisms.

One of the knock-on effects of that lack of trust is likely to be a sharp decline in consumer trust – not just in the financial sector (where lack of trust will be category-wide) but also most likely affecting many Government and state bodies too. This will happen whether or not Government action manages to avoid a depression or ‘lost decade’ scenario: the recession will still be a harsh and worrying time for many people and “it might have been worse” may not cut a lot of ice.

What does all this have to do with social networks? Read the rest of this entry »

Hello again. Here’s what happened to me.

I presented a paper at the MRS Awards in March, called “Confessions Of A Moderator” and about online communities. It was a big hit: so big in fact that my day job started involving more and more online work and social media ‘internal consultancy’, which meant little time for updating this blog.

I then lost that job and got a better one, working for Kantar Operations as their Social Media Knowledge Leader - basically acting as a social media ‘guru’ across the whole of the Kantar group, which is large and having just acquired TNS is about to get a lot larger. I started that role at the beginning of October and it’s been as challenging and fun as I hoped it would be.

So since my job is now to think about social media stuff (in a research context), and since I’m reading and thinking about all sorts of internet malarkey anyhow, why not bring Blackbeardblog back as a personal platform and notebook for what I’m doing?

It should go without saying, by the way, but no part of this blog represents the official opinions of Kantar, Kantar Operations or any associated company. All content and opinions are mine alone.

The new Blackbeard Blog will mostly be about online communities, social media, and their relationship to market research. But not necessarily always about those things. I have also installed a spam filter at last so perhaps an actual design will finally follow…

Other news! I’m speaking at the WARC Online Research conference in March to talk about the business case for social media, and I’m chairing a panel at the 2009 MRS Conference about online communities. I can say no more about that at the moment save that it will be completely awesome.

I have a wretched headache today so am drawn to grim thoughts, such as Ray Poynter’s warning that the boosterism for “Research 2.0” masks genuine threats to the research industry. The argument, which as a staffer in a big agency I’m very sympathetic to, boils down to the fact that the web offers fantastic new opportunities for brands and consumers to understand one another better, and that almost none of these opportunities actually require a research agency at any point.

Yesterday I read this piece in the Guardian which underlined the problem. Read the rest of this entry »

I was asked to contribute a piece to an upcoming Haymarket publication on “current trends in online research”, an offer I shamelessly accepted despite the fact that I don’t actually do any online research. Maybe one day I will! Rather than reprint it here, I will link to the piece as and when it appears (unless they spike it!) but at a juicy 1,000 words I was able to touch on most of my favourite themes: web communities, respondent interaction, the business need for enjoyable research, research games, network theory, superrespondents, Gladwell vs Watts, qual online and qual-quant hybrids, with a big “of course the imperative is to prove these new techniques’ effectiveness” figleaf at the end. I have to say I’m really enjoying my job right now! What did I miss?

In other, “me! me! me!” news, I’m in Research magazine next month as part of a new feature on researchers who lead double lives (music writing and research, in my case) - GASP! at the unforeseen connection between these two thrilling disciplines. I’ve also been nominated for three MRS awards, which is awesome, and the International Journal of Market Research asked me to submit the paper too. I still haven’t actually got a pdf of my paper post-conference, so I can’t show you it. Anyway, things are good, and next week I should have time to start following up on some recent posts here.

(With apologies to Curiouslypersistent for the puntabulous headline)

Interesting comment at Wired about the reaction - or overreaction - of Flickr users hostile to that site’s recent enabling of video uploads. Wired’s take on it is very much a tech-oriented one: this is an extra feature! How dare they complain! From a branding perspective the Flickr users seem a bit more sympathetic. What we have here is a classic branding problem: what happens when a brand extension conflicts with a brand’s core values? In this case, video uploads would seem a logical extension to flickr, but flickr users who like the site because it seems to promote and encourage good photography* are upset - it’s a shift away from that core value, as they perceive it. As Wired points out, the hostile reaction is also rooted in fear of the wrong kind of newbies joining the site, so this is an example of a classic community question too - when does love of a community become protectionism?

In the old days debates about the core values of a brand would have been played out between owners, distributors, retailers, advertisers - the fact that Flickr has users who are passionate and articulate about what they love about the site is an asset. It’s also potentially a headache.

Incidentally, I get the feeling that the word “respondent” is increasingly frowned on in MR circles, because ‘we don’t interview respondents, we interview people’ - and also “participant” sounds a bit kinder. I am hugely sympathetic to “participant” but I’m sticking with respondent for now because a lot of research - most research, even - is still based on one-way transmission of information up a chain. The solutions outlined in the last post will certainly lead to more suitable names for the people involved in different types of research projects - participants, customers, subjects, etc. - but for now genuinely participatory projects still seem rare to me.

The problem of non-response is one of the enormous problems of market research: it was when I started working as a researcher, and it still is now. I’m going to briefly introduce the idea in this post (because lots of the people reading aren’t researchers) and talk about four trends in countering it, and then the plan is to follow up with posts looking at these trends in more depth.

What is the problem? Put simply: it’s harder and harder to get people to answer market research questions, especially in first world countries. There are lots of reasons: people are time-poor, other kind of marketing activity (like cold calling) put them off, people don’t trust marketers or don’t believe they’ll see a benefit, and so on.

This is a problem because it makes research more expensive and time-consuming to do. But behind this trend is another, deeper, problem: are the people who do take part in research the same as the people who don’t? This was one of the first things I ever asked on my graduate training course and the answer was a pretty unequivocal “yes”. Read the rest of this entry »

Two of the buzzier web apps right now are muxtape and tumblr - or at least I assume they’re buzzy, I’ve seen lots of friends mention them. I could see a use for both of them personally so I was checking them out today, and I was struck by something they both share: they are very much web 1.0 style applications, using modern resources (high-speed internet and high-mobility internet, respectively) to resurrect a turn-of-the-decade spirit. Read the rest of this entry »

I found Datawocky by browsing del.icio.us - it is (so far) excellent: insightful, well- and clearly-written. Data mining, and how researchers can work with large-scale transactional databases, is a hot topic and likely to get hotter as the people we researchers work for learn more and more about how to get insight out of their own databases. Datawocky hasn’t directly addressed market research as yet, and there’s no reason why he should! But even if he never does I’ll still feel more enlightened on the general topic of data mining for reading the blog.