Social media research remains a thorny area. In the Brands and Social Media session at MRS Conference, Dominic Scott-Malden looked at the implications of social media in a world where people are increasingly cynical about brands. Simon McDonald and Annelies Verhaeghe of InSites Consulting looked at conversations about brands online, and the varied levels of success that brands are having in tapping in to them.

Peter Dann of The Nursery revealed results of research into how people see brands in social media. He was the second speaker to quote Saatchi & Saatchi’s Richard Huntington saying that the way brands use social media remains “clumsy, inept and disrespectful” . “There seems to be fairly wide agreement that brands are getting social media wrong as much as they’re getting it right,” he said.

People who talk about brands in social media generally want to be heard, but they don’t like “hawkers and stalkers”, so it’s important to respect people’s expectations of privacy, which remain somewhat confused. But the application of old research rules to the new world of social media is misguided and unnecessary, Dann argued. “The principle of informed consent just doesn’t apply [in social media] any more than it does in any other published media,” he said.

After tracking comments posted (publicly) on Twitter, Dann asked the people who wrote them if they minded their tweets being used for market research. Not only did all but one of them say yes, but most of them were surprised that anyone would even bother to ask.

Public social media “is a forum where researchers belong,” Dann said. “If we don’t embrace this area ethically and professionally, I can assure you there are plenty of social media practitioners out there less guided by ethics than we are, and they don’t have any such compunctions.”