Live blogged at MRS in London. Any errors or bad jokes are my own.
The art of noise by Tom Ewing
- #IPAsocialworksinitiative – to guide effective use of social media data
- It’s all about measuring not counting, Ray Poynter wrote this part
- The insight guide is being written by Tom Ewing and he is interviewing people for it
- Five basic questions
- What questions do you need to answer, what decisions will betaken because of it
- What do you know already, existing research, behavioural
- What social behaviora are you looking for, what data sources, do you need aggregate data or granular level
- What is the relevant timescale, ad hoc or continuous, how do you know yyou’re finished
- Do you need quant metrics, what are they, it’s more than likes follows
- We have reached the peak of social tech
- Seth Grimes says the state of social insight is “confused,” it’s not really a mature technology, widely adopted, but not fully integrated
- It’s the early majority now, tactical, silos, unstructured text, the future is here but it is unevenly distributed
- We need to clear out the cliches, integrate with methodologies, integrate with insights and business and people
- Different poll results would arise if you use Twitter vs Facebook [i see this as a sampling problem, you don’t just take any church or school or company and say it is representative]
- UK Facebook data is closer to a census than a sample [but it is still very much a sample!]
- You can join insights with other methodologies [data fusion is ALWAYS wise, every method reveals different insights]
- Provide more file and predictive tracking systems and an ability to get granular and specific
- Who owns social insight? Is it marketing? Analytics? Insights? PR? Sales? It’s more about collaborating [why must one group OWN it, everyone can benefit hugely from it]
- Finding common ground – we’re all working toward the same goal, emotional understanding of people
- Limits of real time means it’s more tactical but there is indeed strategic value
- How do you get insight about a topic when you know nothing about it [oh goodness, I could go on about this. I was asked to draw insights about cars and trucks. I know NOTHING about them and couldn’t understand anything people were talking about. Expertise in the topic is a MUST! Put me on the food/outdoors/music research.]
- AI is already doing so much work that people would have done – collecting data, sorting and coding, analyzing, prepping, reporting
- Social insight begins with social practice, use new platforms like Whatsapp and snapchat, look beyond the brand level to the topic level, consider pictures and video, look for patterns at the network level
- Different things come out via text and images but you wno’t know unless you plan and look for differences in different types of content
- We are working towards general use, stratégie, cooperation, seamless integration among people, rich media as well as unstructured text
- Tom asks people to submit their social media case studies to him for publication in the book
Finding insight in 140 characters by Jake Steadman
- Jake [not from Statefarm] speaks
- Story about Star Wars, in 1977, need to tap into mainstream media, tap into core group of fans, went on TV and publications. FOr second movie he went to com icon. Fans went in the hundreds to see them in person for Q and A.
- Today, mobile is eating other media time.everyone has a mobile phone. December of last year, new Star Wars came out. Still need media and interest and fan base. THey launched on Twitter. That tweet drove all the other media. Drove coverage in print. Access to the stars still applies but they did it more directly and personal on Twitter. Stars did this on the red carpet, backstage, White House visits, all on Twitter. 1.2 billion tweets on opening weekend.
- All social data can drive insight
- There are culture issues and there are tools.
- Rise of the machines, machines allow you to become storytellers and consultants, it allows you to be a leader not a methodological policeman
- Let’s you do same day insights and be agility, we need to get over our obsession with precision, forget statistical precision [agreed, don’t create precision with decimal places, know when your data is directional and don’t make it more than it is ]
- Social is the democratization of data, client side is more like to be using social, agencies are more likely to be using big data, agencies need to be more for less and quicker
- Look for your soggy fries – customers were starting be less loyal with a restaurant, you could run a large research project, or you could look at social data immediately, found many uses of the word ‘soggy fries’, it didn’t need precision but rather it needed recognition
Panel with Jenny Burns, Christopher Wellbelove, Jess Owens, James Devon
- Some people jump at social media because it’s cheaper than things like focus groups [be cautious, cheaper means you need to spend more time thinking and analyzing it]
- Lots of people are analyzing social media without ever using it, you need to use the tools to really understand them [the speaker has now gone through three pairs of google glasses, and might be tweeting as we speak 🙂 ]
- Social media is still treated as a slightly dangerous cousin
- 67% of people using social media puts it really into late adoption, it is not new nor early adopter territory
- It says more about the market research industry being years behind to be so late in using this technology
- Privacy and ethics still matter, some companies get individual permission to review Twitter accounts
- People need to understand how their data is being used, whether it’s aggregated, Facebook data is fully anonymized and aggregated and great for ethics and privacy
[I kind of like have a couple presentations followed by a separate panel]
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