Pettit left Ipsos in early 2009 and has been an independent consultant since then. In that time she started working with Conversition on the development of Evolisten, a platform which analyses information on brands, products and product categories – all of which is culled from social media sources but which processes and presents that information in the same way as more traditional market research.

For example, the firm says, “more than 600 specific key measures and their norms, including the marketing mix measures (product, placement, pricing, promotion) and the traditional research measures (purchasing, recommendations, trial) are tracked on a daily basis”.

Conversition was launched in April last year by two former Ipsos executives, Jean Davis and Tessie Ting. Aside from Evolisten, it runs the MatterMeter service and TweetFeel, a Twitter-based sentiment analysis tool.

Ting said: “We are so pleased to have Annie join Conversition as our CRO. As the architect behind the iPi4 multi-stage survey data quality process at Ipsos, she demonstrated a level of industry knowledge and research expertise that our clients will appreciate. Her skills will ensure that our research products continue to reflect the highest degree of rigour.”

Pettit runs the LoveStats blog and has previously written for Researchhere.