The internet and digital technologies are an integral part of the modern world – and as marketers and researchers, we are immersed in this space. We’re helping brands communicate effectively in social media, we’re creating new digital products and understanding online customer experiences – and we’re doing it this through online communities, social media insight and mobile research apps.
But there’s a problem
The dirty little secret is, how far does the industry really understand the technological ground it walks upon? Research firms mostly hire people with degrees in psychology, social sciences and humanities. Don’t get me wrong, these are great subjects and give us a lot of insight into human behaviour and culture. Problem is, it leaves us only observers of the technological world – not hackers and makers.
As a result, innovation in the research industry is not keeping up with the technology:
“We lag behind. Sometimes by years – in the case of harnessing communities, we worked out how to do it just as the ‘community’ model was dissolving online into networks. In the case of gamification, we were a bit quicker, only a year or so behind the overall hype. Intellectually speaking, research is largely a distant, rather slow cousin of the tech business.”
[Tom Ewing, Blackbeard Blog, 22 March]
A quick test: how many of these tech acronyms do you recognise?
- API
- TCP/IP
- CSS
- W3C
- SaaS
- FOMO
That last one’s a bit of a trick: it’s not a technology but the acronym Fear Of Missing Out – or #fomo, as teen Twitter natives would put it. And “missing out” is exactly what the research industry is doing if we don’t really understand the technical ground our digital world is built on.
Here’s one of those building blocks: all the information encoded within a tweet and accessible through the Twitter API. If you want to innovate in social media research, you’ve got to know what options you have to play with. But how many in the industry do?

Map Of A Twitter Status Object by Raffi Kikorian (@raffi)
What can research companies do about it? Hiring a creative technologist is a good start, as we said in our “Emerging Roles in Research” blog post a year ago. But as ethnographers we have another tool up our sleeves: it’s called participant observation. Learning by doing. Learning to code, and learning to build basic web technologies ourselves. Sound scary? It shouldn’t be.
Minibar Codemaker
A couple of weeks ago, Linda Maruta and I (Jess Owens) went to Codemaker, run by the UK tech meet-up MiniBar. In just eight hours this course covered:
- A condensed history of computing and the web
- A lesson in tech jargon – from API & OS to Python, Ruby and MySQL
- How the modern web works – the technologies behind Twitter, Facebook and Google
- Mix & Mash your favourite websites
- How to make beautiful web sites with HTML and CSS
- JavaScript and JQuery
- Deconstruct your own web app (intro to Agile principles)
- Make your own web app
It was a pretty fast-moving course, and it helped to have some familiarity with coding already. Linda’s our Digital Project Manager and works with our developer team day in, day out. I work in the social media team – and both of us went into the course knowing some HTML, a bit of CSS and our Twitter API from our elbows.
Nonetheless, by mid-afternoon we were doing far more than we’d ever expected – mashing up Google Maps data with real-time geolocated Twitter information and public datasets. It was awesome.
A course like this won’t make anybody a fully-fledged programmer in a day – instructor Peter Brownell is great but he’s not a magician. But it will leave you knowing much more about how web technologies work, and collaborating better with developers on social data projects in future. That’s worth the entry price alone.
But more than that, this course left me excited. I’ve been friends with programmers for years, but somehow coding has never seemed like something I could really do – it was just too big a body of knowledge to learn. But this course changed that: it showed me how to start. Best of all, it gave us all the tools – JQuery examples, JSFiddle to play with the code live, and geodata via Google Fusion Tables - to go away and keep playing, and experimenting, and learning.

Another way
While I was writing this post I realised: there are other ways to learn these things. Several of my FACE colleagues have next-generation Masters degrees marrying the social with the technological, from programmes that including courses in coding and building digital media alongside more standard soc sci methods. And it’s not just the social media team I’m talking about here – FACE qual researchers have studied these courses too. Think Masters degrees such as Advanced Interactive Technology Design (Nottingham), Digital Media (Goldsmiths) and Digital Humanities (UCL). The academic training may only have been out there in the last 5 years, but there’s a new generation of graduates coming through with some very next-generation skills.
And these are skills the research industry is crying out for. Let’s not bemoan a ‘talent shortage’, let’s get out there building links, speaking at universities, providing work experience and sharing research technology. That’s how you hire the next generation of researchers.
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Jess is Social Media Research Manager at FACE. Check out her other blog posts on digital culture and technology here, or share your thoughts on this article with us at @FaceCocreation.
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