Kim Kershaw

On her way to the Australian Market and Social Research Society's 2008 Summer School in February, 28 year old Quantum Market Research senior project consultant Kim Kershaw was killing time on Facebook while waiting for her flight to Coffs Harbour in Sydney's Qantas Club.
She noticed that her friend Emma Sissons had updated her Facebook status to ‘on my way to Coffs Harbour'. Doubting it was a coincidence, Kershaw quickly fired off a message to Sissons, then looked around her. There were only about 40 people in the lounge that day and, sure enough, on the far side of the room, Sissons was one of them.

Kershaw was born in Brazil and started school here in Australia, but moved overseas when she was 10. She and Sissons had gone to the same primary school, but hadn't seen each other in person for 18 years.

The two only recently re-connected through Facebook, and discovered they both worked in market research (Sissons works for Ipsos in Canberra). Kershaw doubts she would have found - or recognised - her old friend without Facebook, and believes it is a great example of the power of Web 2.0.

What is Web 2.0?
Kershaw was one of 21 participants in the Web 2.0 workshop at Summer School, which was facilitated by UK-based Ray Poynter from The Future Place. Web 2.0 refers to second generation internet tools, including user generated content such as blogs and online video sites like YouTube, photo sharing sites (Flickr), social bookmarking (Digg it, Deli.ci.ous), social networking (like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and LinkedIn) and personalisation tools (iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes).

Technologists will talk about Web 2.0 using terms like RSS (really simple syndication), 'tag clouds' and application programming interfaces (APIs) but, from the layperson's point of view, Web 2.0 simply describes that fact that users can do more than just retrieve information.

Web 2.0 enables anyone to personalise, share and create - in stark contrast to ‘old school' web sites, which were limited to ‘read only' one-way communication.

Web 2.0 has enabled entirely new research methods, like polls embedded in blogs and social networking profiles, ‘texting to blogs' (real time responses from research participants on location), picture uploads from mobile phones to blogs and forums, and participants adding their own open-ended responses at the end of questionnaires via web cams.

Visitors to Web 2.0 sites are even being asked to help categorise (‘tag') the content - in a way, becoming ‘amateur research coders'. ‘Tag clouds' weren't invented for market and social researchers, but they are a simple and quick text analysis tool. Poynter demonstrated the power of the application by generating a tag cloud from Prime Minister Rudd's ‘sorry' speech.

Again, in true Web 2.0 style, Poynter had already set up a Facebook page for the group before the workshop and had set up a Ning group which participants were asked to join upon arrival. (This article was partly co-created by participants through the Ning group.)

How can Web 2.0 be used in market and social research?
Several Australian researchers have started experimenting with online qualitative research, using forums and custom-built online chat technology. Others have journeyed into the blogosphere to monitor ‘chatter' about their client's products, services and brands. The Human Network is now recruiting through Facebook. Yet social networking tools have not yet been embraced here to the same extent they have been in the United States, the UK and Europe.

In the United States, Gen Y specialist agency Peanut Labs provides market researchers with access to members of social networking sites (it has just received $3.2m in funding from venture capital firms Leapfrog Ventures and BV Capital). In the UK, numerous research studies are conducted in online social networking environments. In the virtual world, eight market research agencies - based in the northern hemisphere in the real world - are operating in Second Life. In January, The Social Research Foundation officially launched the First Opinions Panel in Second Life, a consumer research panel set up to provide Fortune 500 companies with resident insight and feedback on new products, services and policies. The panel is owned by SRF, but it is being exclusively licensed to and managed by MarketTools, a joint venture of Procter and Gamble (P&G) and General Mills.

However, Brian Fine, CEO of The ORU, president of Association of Market and Social Research Organisations (AMSRO) and the driving force behind online quality standards in this country, says virtual worlds like Second Life are interesting, but not gaining enough traction to warrant more researchers going onto the worlds and selling research services.

‘Recruiting people from these worlds is only relevant to the world, and not necessarily representative. There is huge attrition of avatars on these worlds, and they may not be sustainable.'

Virtual worlds aside, some worry that the Australian market and social research industry is in danger of falling behind when it comes to Web 2.0. This is particularly because the Australian public, particularly ‘net naturals' (aged under 20) and Generation Y, have embraced Web 2.0 in phenomenal numbers over the past 12 months.

According to a Nielsen Online social networking report released last month, around 55 percent of online Australians have browsed other people's online profiles within the past 12 months, and 44 percent have actively updated their own online profile. Almost one third of these only begun their social networking in the last quarter.

‘In recent times we've seen social networking grow exponentially to become a significant online activity,' says Melanie Ingrey, market research director, Asia Pacific, Nielsen Online. ‘And based on the viral nature of social networking adoption, we expect to see further significant increases in the near future - as many as half of current non-users have already indicated they will sign up within the next 12 months.'

As a number of commentators have pointed out (most recently Crikey), ‘If MySpace were a country it would be the 11th largest by population, between Japan and Mexico, thanks to its 110 million monthly active users.' Interestingly, although MySpace is the most popular social networking site visited by Australians (48 per cent), Facebook (with 37 per cent) is catching up.

Poynter says 1.9 million Australians have set up a Facebook profile, and he believes Facebook's popularity is largely due to the fact that it has embraced Web 2.0 more fully than MySpace. Unlike its competitor, Facebook has opened up its interface to third party applications and shares profits with those who develop the applications (although in reality, this only benefits a very small number - probably around 150 - of the developers who have collectively created in excess of 7,500 Facebook applications).

One of these applications is Facebook Polls. For US$0.25 per response, it is possible to pose one question with five options and target users for ‘better, faster results' by either interest area, location, age or sex.

However, while he uses the application occasionally Poynter says that because Facebook Polls are so basic, he recommends using ‘off-Facebook' online survey tools and simply directing Facebook groups to the survey. There are basic survey tools like Polldaddy (which enable you to embed a one question poll into a web page), through to online questionnaire tools like Surveymonkey and more advanced suites like Confirmit.

Poynter believes Facebook has taken off among market and social researchers (some 905 at the time of writing have joined his group, ‘The Big List of Market Researchers') because it was huge in universities and as students graduated, they took it with them.

Grace Taylor, marketing manager at the South Australian Research and Development Institute (SARDI), says : ‘Facebook swept through our worksite until it was banned by corporate. One of the biggest "Facebookees" says the novelty soon wore off. I wonder if these could be faddish - like yoyos. It takes effort to keep up to it.'

Poynter acknowledges ‘it's pretty clear Facebook is a fad', but he believes social networking is not. He believes social networking, and Web 2.0 more generally, has a number of long-term implications for market and social research:

• There is more scope in the industry for open source software solutions, co-created by researchers.
• The corresponding trend of disintermediation, the rise of ‘self-service' and the fact that total value of niche sales is starting to exceed revenue from ‘hit' products means that researchers are now struggling to assemble brand lists.
• The fact that the brand owner can no longer control the channels has affected our structural ability to conduct research.
• The global workshop floor (a phrase coined in Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams) is changing the context in which we do research.
• Given their ability to share and create, it's no longer appropriate to call people ‘respondents' - they're stakeholders or ‘prosumers' (a term promoted by Dan Tapscott in 1996, who borrowed it from the 1980 book The Third Wave by Alvin Toffler) or at least, participants.
• Research participants increasingly expect to be renumerated for their contributions.
• The division between ‘quantitative' and ‘qualitative' will become increasingly academic and modelling and hybrid studies will become more popular.
• We'll see open language scales and computer semiotics ‘very, very soon'.
• Presenting research in a Web 2.0 world will need to be more like Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and the 6 o'clock news.
• Researchers will not move from one product category to another as readily as they did in the past, as subject matter expertise and empathy become increasingly important when conducting research in environments like online forums.

‘You need to live and breathe this stuff much more because you don't have the distance you have had in the past,' Poynter explains. He realised this in his own business when he assigned a researcher to a project about biscuits. ‘We weren't getting much of a response on the forum. Then I asked the researcher, who was tall and lean, if he had ever eaten a whole packet of biscuits in his life - and he hadn't.'

Most importantly, Poynter argues, researchers need to understand that representative samples are no longer the ultimate objective.

‘I think there's always been a great myth about representivity in market research. There has always been a group of people who don't participate in surveys,' Poynter argued at the workshop.

‘You would not be interested in talking to a representative sample of prosumers,' he argues. ‘You'd want to talk to them one-on-one.'

Equipped to use Web 2.0 tools in research
When he arrived at the Summer School Web 2.0 workshop, Neil Stollznow - who until then hadn't used Web 2.0 tools for market and social research purposes although he had played with them during his leisure time - set up his own Ning group called the ‘Cynic group' for ‘those who think that progress should not be evangelised but understood'. In doing so, Stollznow says he wanted to illustrate how easy it is to hijack an online forum.

At the end of the workshop, Stollznow said: ‘I now feel equipped to use Web 2.0 in the business. Blogging is a good place to start. I think that my colleagues and clients will love 2.0 tools. Anything we can do to improve the fun that research participants have is important. The interactive and conversational nature of Web 2.0 is far more in tune with the way people interact. It has to be an improvement.'

Philip Cookson, research director at Philology Pty Ltd (a former director of market research and analysis at Apple, and director of business research for enterprise software at Microsoft) said after the workshop: ‘The session gave me some pointers to new ideas/tools and approaches that I had not previously been aware of such as the capabilities of the Ning social networking site, and the growing importance of tag clouds as navigational/information access devices.

‘I am now planning to customise existing open source web tools that we have been using (such as Drupal and vBulletin board), to enable us to add a richer online qualitative/discussion capability to our offerings. I have also been "inspired" by Ray's example to take on a couple of sample projects in the online discussion area to help build additional expertise/experience in this area ... as well as to iron out the software/integration/technical issues that we may encounter.'

Obstacles to using Web 2.0 in research
Cookson believes that Australia's privacy laws pose a real barrier to the design of the survey methodology (especially if significant amounts of personally identifiable information is stored).

‘There are protocols that you can adopt that enable you to avoid these issues. However, if you are trying to push the envelope with the use of Web 2.0 tools, then you are almost certainly going to "break" the boundaries of the literal interpretation of privacy regulations,' he says.

Poynter says that while concerns have been raised in the UK about Facebook keeping personal data (even after someone has deleted their profile), ‘at the moment there's so little you can do inside Facebook that it's not really a problem for research'. Instead, he believes the bigger problem we are all ignoring is that the fact that many online survey application providers store data in any number of countries, which doesn't conform with anybody's data protection laws.

Poynter and others at Summer School speculated that Australia's privacy laws - along with the Australian market and social research industry's attempts to differentiate itself from direct marketing to win exclusions from the Do Not Call register - mean that it's more challenging to completely embrace ‘Research 2.0' here.

However Cookson believes the biggest obstacle in our local market will be a lack of client demand/acceptance of these new approaches.

‘I know that we will encounter a lot of scepticism for the use of Web 2.0 tools for online qualitative forms of research and "social networking" projects that border on marketing/market research (even among our technology based clients),' he explains.

‘The issue is that these methods don't provide the same "quantitative integrity" that some clients associate with more traditional forms of market research. We have a difficult enough time convincing some of our heavily "numbers oriented" clients of the value of any form of qualitative research, without the added issues associated with doing this online. We are much more likely to be successful with our non-technology oriented clients who already value qualitative research approaches, and who trust us on the online component because of our extensive experience with this technology.'

Poynter concluded the Summer School Web 2.0 workshop by reminding participants that the technology continues to change very quickly. In this fast moving environment, it will be difficult for legislation, guidelines and standards to keep up.

‘It is really important for the longevity of social networking for researchers to disclose who they are,' says Poynter. ‘ESOMAR's guidelines are just starting to get with "traditional online research" (panels) but that's the old stuff. I believe we need to look at ethnography guidelines and mystery shopping guidelines to see what they are telling us.

‘But, ultimately, it is the people who join these social networks who will define the rules.'

By Kerry Sunderland, managing editor, Research News

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