MR's twin-track approach to social media research

Social media research continues to be one of the hottest topics in research. I’ve just been reviewing the abstracts for this year’s CASRO Technology Conference in New York in June, which I will be co-chairing, and of all the topics, its the one with the longest string of submissions. Not only that, but there is some diversity of opinion into what it is, how to do it, and whether it adds anything at all to the existing researchers’ toolkit. Closer to home, it’s a topic that will be debated in next week’s Research conference in London too.

Social media research is also one of the new topics we focused on in the 2010 annual software survey, sponsored by Globalpark, which my firm, meaning ltd, carries out each year. The results of the 2010 study are published today. There are some curious findings – and some predictable ones too – that add perspective to the current debate on social media research.

Our survey of over 200 research companies of all size around the world, shows social media research is still at the early-adopter stage,  accounting for revenue-generating activity in just 17% of the firms surveyed. Close to the same number – 19% – say they are unlikely to offer social media research, and of the remaining 63% who gave an answer, 31% say they are either experimenting with it and 32% are considering it for the future. Small firms and research companies in Europe are the least likely to be doing social media research and are also the most likely to have ruled it out, whereas large firms are the ones that are most active. The actual volumes of work are still low – we also asked how much revenue social media research accounted for. It is 5% or under for  two-thirds of the agencies that do it and tails off beyond that – but there appear to be some specialists emerging, with a handful of firms deriving more than 20% of their income from it.

Many firms are bullish about the future, though, with 20% predicting strong growth, and a further 52% anticipating some growth, with North America, and again the larger firms, most optimistic about its future.

As a technologist, I was most interested to see what technology firms were applying to what is, after all, something born out of technology. Were the tech-savvy gaining the upper hand, or were researchers taking the conventional, low-tech approach beloved of qualitative researchers. Again, it’s a bit of both. Of all the software-based or statistical methods we suggested for data analysis, the one that came top, was “manual methods”, used by 57%. For analysis, this followed by 54% citing “text mining” (as correspondents could pick all that they used). Text mining, though it uses some computing power, is also very much a hands-on method – but it’s good to see more than half turning to this method. Other methods make much less of an appearance, and the method that I consider shows most promise for dealing with the deluge of data, machine learning-based text classification, was bottom of the list, cited by one in six practitioners.

For data collection, technology was much more apparent – although it is hard to avoid here. We were still intrigued by the massive 54% who say they are using manual methods to harvest their social media data from the web; 57% were using web technologies to collect the data, and the more exotic methods were also fairly abundant, including using bots (43%), crowdsourcing (41%) and avatars (24%).

I’ll pick up on some of the other intriguing findings from the study later. But as the report is out now, you can pick up your own copy by visiting this webpage – and there will be a full report in the May issue of Research magazine.