The Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan #Eso3D #esomar

This is a live blog posting from the Esomar 3D conference in Miami. Written, summarized, and posted just minutes after the speaker has finished. Any inaccuracies are my own. Any humorous side-notes are mine as well.

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The Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan
Investigate the possibilities and limits of social media research from researching how the earthquake changed the sense of value of Japanese people
Koki Uchiyama & Michio Mutoh, Hottolink, Japan
Eriko Ota, Kirin Holdings Company, Japan

Good Movie to understand the image of Social Media Research. http://fb.me/YxtuGj6c—
Koki Uchiyama (@ucchy_en) May 02, 2011

3-11 Japanese will never forget this day [The room is stunningly quiet. I'm already teary ]
How did this disaster change their values, their buying behaviours?
They used social media research because it could go backwards in time. SMR is usually for product or company research. Keywords for monitoring are easy to define. Now, we want to research the change in sense of value? What keyword do you monitor? This is the big challenge.
Created group with diverse background, food/beverage/car/house professionals included in the project. They brainstormed hypotheses and taped them to the wall.
Categories like life, spending, drinking, health, relationships, jobs
Searched 23 million blogs, eliminated spam. Why blogs and not Twitter or Facebook? Blogs include backgrounds and reasons. [Yeah baby! This is what sampling is all about. Choose the sources that are appropriate for your research.]
They eliminated seasonal effects. Demand for beer went up after earthquake. But that was purely a seasonal effect, not reality. [norms and trending is what makes SMR so great]
Increased conversations – housing, saving energy, earthquakes, nuclear power station. Why is there more concern for saving energy? Because the power plant disaster only affect a tiny group of people whereas energy affected the entire country.
Fear increased after the events but it returned to normal quickly
“Hang in there” increased after the events but after the earthquake it stayed a bit higher then pre-event. People deliberately tried to be more positive after the event. This is healing.
Volunteering, trust, cooperation, support increased after the events and stayed above norms. [Social media research for good. Warm fuzzies.]
Change in values – fear has returned to normal and they seek normality now, traditional values, flexibility, solidarity, community, social contribution, simple and modest consumption.
Explore the past, thinking actions and emotions, infer the changes of values,
Need human power to infer the changes of sense of values from the ones of the phenomenon
Next step – More automated processes, more quant, add in traditional components or MROCs
[Wonderful inspiring presentation. Research for good.]