The Roles of Blogs in Public Opinion Research Dissemination #AAPOR #MRX

… Live blogging from beautiful Boston…

Reg Baker, SurveyGeek

• First blog post was on randomization
• His company considered him to be a methodologist because he subscribed to POQ, he kept answering the same questions so he wrote the answers in a blog and referred everyone there
• Twitter is how you build blog traffic, We love the retweets of our blogs
• There is a social media bubble of all the people talking about the same things you do, and you meet people around the world only because of your buzz
• Two families of blogs – those sharing research results and those in the commentator category
• Biggest peak of all – sarcasm sells – begged people to not use words like disruptive, holistic, superlatives; next largest blog was how to write a mobile pitch piece about the hyperbole around mobile research
• Conference blogging gets lots of hits, as do posts in a series
• Hardest thing about blogging is you need to do it all the time and it’s hard, you need to do it day in and day out, something people care about want to hear about
• Useful and fun way to share information, it can get you into trouble, say things you wish you didn’t say

Annie Pettit, LoveStats

• If you missed my talk, it was a ten minute psychoanalysis, you missed out 🙂
• Here are two posts I wrote previously…
• 6 reasons why you should start a blog now
• Should you blog at conferences?

Adam Sage, SurveyPost

• Put a viewpoint out there to start a discussion
• Peer reviewed research takes a lot of time
• Focus on twitter, crowdsourcing, infomatics, concepts that are difficult to publish before they are outdated
• Blogs consider the readers to be the jury
• Ripe for innovation, more than just you shouting with a megaphone

Marjorie Connelly, New York Times

• They post blogs and vet blogs that go on many different places on their site
• Website has no print deadline so they can post at any time
• Blogs offer a different voice than the print paper, columnists often have their own blogs and they often use polls to support their arguments – they have no control over those polls
• Often breaking news or incisive posts
• Use live blogging for celebrity events like debut of the ipad, Tony Awards
• Venue for things that wouldn’t be accepted into the paper
• Let authors say more and more deeply than the printed paper
• Can do early releases of data in order to tease a later print version

Jeffrey Henning, ResearchScape

• Started his Vovici blog as part of content marketing, and he needed something to do in the newly formed merged companies
• First blog post was about asking demographic questions, designed only by considering what google wanted
• His new company “ResearchScape”  needed the same kind of marketing work
• His ranking of 50 top blogs turned into 50 days of posts
• Realized not a lot of people are sharing results of studies – white space in the blogging world to support more
• Journalists do a poor job of putting research results into context – Jeffrey gives them an F. Researchscape is trying to fix this and Jeffrey gives himself a D for what he’s done so far. He wants to improve to a C+ next year.
• A blog is a place to practice in a small audience, help you become better at explaining methodologies

Casey Tasfaye, FreeRangeResearch

• You don’t know your opinion until you write it down
• Assumptions about what research is changes when you try to write it down
• Place to combine all her data sources – school, friends, talks – and make sense of it. It’s about her trying to figure things out.
• Her blogs explores intersections of different worlds, shares discussions about polls, reports events and conferences, things she reads, research findings
• Her meditation calendar is a good source of  blog posts
• Good place for problem solving, discuss them in a public way
• Also talks about digital parenting – how does she deal with her kids and social media
• Tries to have a blog roll, lists of organizations, lists of helpful links, lists of good tools
• Twitter is a good tool for listening, amplifying, and discussion
• very little engagement on the blogs themselves but lots on twitter
• #WJchat is good to listen to
• Twitter is a great way to follow conceptual trends
• A lot of research doesn’t get published and blogging can deal with this

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