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Blog, Jobs@Face, Social Media

Emerging Roles Profile: The Social Media Researcher

Date January 27 2012
Posted by Chris
Tagged with

Face MD Job Muscroft started a series of posts about the emerging roles changing the face of market research earlier this month. Now, we’re going to take a closer look at each of these roles in turn, starting with Face social media researcher Jess Owens.

How would you describe your role?

As a social media researcher you’re a customer barometer for your clients – you see far more of what customers are thinking than probably anyone in their business. And, unlike almost all other information sources, it’s all real-time.

In social media monitoring projects, you’re feeding that back to the business – often hundreds of people, including the board – weekly or fortnightly to help the different client teams understand the impact of what they’re doing, what’s working, and what’s not. In insight briefs, the scope is a lot wider – often there’s a big element of explaining trends, “internet culture”, emerging technologies and so on.

How did you become a social media researcher? What’s your background?

I got a job at Face in part through having a Twitter account (@hautepop) which demonstrated that (a) I understood social media and (b) I think analytically about it. I’d been talking to Fran (our Director of Innnovation and head of Face Labs, @abc3d) on Twitter for a while, so when I sent in a speculative CV it got read. As a friend of mine put it the other day, “Our social graph is our passport” now.

But it’s also pretty crucial to be at home with both qualitative and quantitative thinking. I’m a bit of an extreme example here (BA in social anthropology; A-levels in maths, further maths & physics), but being able to handle both analysing datasets and explaining “what it means” is central to the job.

Beyond this, though, I’ve been active in online communities since 1995 and I’m fascinated by online culture. At heart, perhaps every social media researcher is an ethnographer or a “native informant” mediating between online and client worlds.

Any tips for how to stand out from the competition when you’re trying to get a job in social media research?

It’s amazing how many people don’t even have an active Twitter account… It’s a new field, we don’t expect 10 years of experience in “social media research” per se – but demonstrating specific interest and experience in both fields is pretty essential. Don’t be a generic marketer.

Ideally I’d love to see someone who’s big on Tumblr, or makes influential comedy or beauty videos on YouTube – something that really demonstrates that not only do they “get” how a particular channel works, they’re passionate about online sociality in general. Participant-observers can reach deeper insights than voyeurs.

What are the top three rules you have to follow as a social media researcher?

(1) Don’t lose sight of the wood for the trees. When doing analysis, it’s incredibly easy to be distracted by interesting discussions and follow these off, losing sight of the research question you’re trying to answer.
(2) An anecdote is not data. If you’re seeing 2000 mentions/day, one interesting tweet or forum thread is not in itself meaningful. First you need to establish whether or not it’s part of a wider pool of comment or complaints.
(3) Social media research is not PR – if customers are pissed off, your job is to explain that objectively, not play it down or try to cast them as in the wrong.

What’s the biggest mistake you most often see in social media research? What’s so bad about it?

People breaking rule #2 above (mistaking anecdote for data) – a singular “cute story” doesn’t necessarily mean anything and may in fact be misleading. It risks making social media analysis look like PR fluff rather than one of the central sources of business intelligence for the next decade and beyond.

Where do you see your role going in the next five years? What’s the future for social media research?

Big! Social media – and its intersection with mobile – is a really booming field, and moving incredibly quickly. In five years, social media research won’t be a distinct field – in fact it’s not one now, it never has been. Instead it’ll be an umbrella-category for a wide range of research methods done by all sorts of people, from brand and customer analysis to data journalism, economic & financial forecasters, policing & security services, academics and digital humanities researchers. The raw material of analysis certainly won’t just be social media content but integrating social and network data of all kinds.

Obviously market research only owns a minute part of it. The social media analytics field is dominated by tech firms, from IBM to Radian 6, Sysomos etc. Some follow more of a strategy consulting business model, but most are essentially selling product licences and require companies to either accept only pretty basic top-line insights or have an in-house analytics team. Analytics platforms from the social networks hosting the content may also emerge (e.g. Google+ Analytics, Twitter Analytics).

The qualitative and strategic side – the “what it means” – will be a much smaller part of the whole, but doubtless still offering huge opportunities.

Sounds like you too? If you’re interested in joining Face and helping shape the future of market research as a social media analyst, please submit a CV and cover letter to job@facegroup.com.

Blog, Infographics

Infographics – Style over Substance?

Date October 25 2011
Posted by Chris
Tagged with

Infographics are everywhere. As a method of presenting information clearly and quickly and avoiding the need for vast tracts of data, they’ve been in use since prehistory, when our primitive ancestors would use cave paintings to illustrate their journeys and keep track of livestock and grain. More recently, Florence Nightingale used the Coxcomb Chart above, which was made in 1857, to illustrate her point to Queen Victoria. The blue areas represent deaths by preventible or treatable disease during the Crimean conflict, compared to wounds (in red) and other causes (black). To take a closer look, click the image.

Just four years later, the erstwhile Inspector General of Bridges and Roads, Charles Joseph Minard, created the infographic below to depict the disastrous Napoleonic invasion of Russia. The red line represents the march to Moscow whilst the black line shows the retreat. This infographic fulfils its function beautifully, showing simply and powerfully how an army of 422,000 men came back as just 10,000 as bad weather (the line graph below the main body of the graphic) and stiff resistance took its toll. Minard was renowned for the advances he made in the presentation of data, having already created this map of the cattle sent from around France for consumption in Paris in 1858. Scientist and photographer Etienne-Jules Marey expressed the influence of Minard’s depiction of the Russian campaign perfectly: “it defies the pen of the historian in its brutal eloquence”.

The 20th century saw further, dramatic developments in the field of infographics, as one of the most iconic infographics ever emerged in London. The London underground map, designed by Harry Beck, communicates the necessary information clearly and concisely in comparison with the geographically accurate maps of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

So has the infographic retained its power and “brutal eloquence” into the 21st century? Certainly, they remain popular and ubiquitous. In the last 12 months Google have seen a significant upward trend in people searching for the word itself, and marketing companies are using infographics as a way of pushing their message viral. There are even dedicated websites for the curation of the best infographics.

However, there’s also a growing issue of people creating infographics which are unclear, illegible and, frankly, downright ugly. As we’ve established, the best infographics are powerful enough to validate that old cliche that a picture is worth a thousand words. But the worst do more to confuse and bewilder than even the least carefully chosen words. The above is a prime example – a whirl of text and colour that serves only to obfuscate whatever point the creator was trying to make. Almost equally heinous is this example, below, from Ikea, usually purveyors of simple, attractive design – made with honourable intent, perhaps, but as attractive as a school science project and ultimately a waste of their designers’ time.

The moral of the story is this: if you’re making an infographic or illustrating a report, be certain that it is simple, strong and worth the time it will take to make. A poor infographic, or one which could have served purpose as a chart or table, is more often than not a waste of yours and your audience’s time.

Blog

Using interest graphs in research – Face in the Guardian (again!)

Date October 21 2011
Posted by Chris
Tagged with

Face Research Director and Head of Social Media Francesco D’Orazio is featured in the Guardian today speaking about the value of using interest graphs over social graphs in research.

‘…the opportunities for brand owners to capitalise on all of this are significant. But to do so effectively, they must understand more closely the nuances of socialisation, believes Francesco D’Orazio, research director and head of social media at co-creation planning agency Face.

“There’s an overall trend towards socialisation of all media, but at the same time there is a growing realisation that social relationships are no longer enough,” he explains, citing a recent attempt by US airline Delta to enable customers to share socially details of their ticket purchasing with friends online – an opportunity few took up. Too much attention has been paid to mapping personal connections – plotting an individual’s “social graph” at the cost of understanding the value of shared interests – their “interest graph”. D’Orazio adds: “Many brands are confusing social graphs with interest graphs. Yet our social connections are not always driven by shared interests – who you know does not necessarily conflate with what most interests you.”‘

You can read the full piece here.