Christine Walker

I have just had the great pleasure to attend my first ESOMAR event, the Online Panels Conference held in Chicago, Illinois from 26 to 28 October. The conference was probably misnamed, as the first day explored online qualitative and the word ‘panel' was barely mentioned until day two.

The main theme of conference was ‘listening', and there is a lot to listen to. People are sharing their views at an unprecedented rate, in a confessional culture where there appears to be an audience for anyone who wants to publish. And publish they do. The first paper, titled ‘Social media trends around the world', presented results from the Global Web Index (conducted by TrendStream in the UK) and drove home the rate at which people share their thoughts. According to Trendstream's most recent data, 12 per cent of Australians have written a blog (compared to nine per cent in the UK) and 40 per cent have managed (one of) their social network profiles (compared to 47 per cent in the UK). Across all the countries surveyed, just under 30 per cent had posted a comment on a story.

A paper titled ‘Getting answers without asking questions', from Insights Consulting in Belgium, demonstrated the idea of listening on a grand scale. The study on which this paper was based analysed the online buzz around the X Factor TV show in the Netherlands, using web scraping and text analytics each week after the show aired. In excess of 70,000 comments were coded and the feedback was used to assist choices for themes and songs for the following week's show, and to help contestants shape their profile. This large scale of qualitative answers means the information can be quantified. This was also demonstrated in another paper titled ‘Tweetmiotics', which presented a text analysis of over two million tweets conducted by OMG Research in Chile.

Some in the audience questioned the commercial usability of this sort of analysis, and Twitter in particular. But I believe it is just too compelling for us to ignore. With so much information out there, if market researchers don't analyse it, someone else will.

The relationship we have with people, our respondents, and what it is we ask them to do for us was the subject of ‘It works for us but does it work for them?', a paper presented jointly by Colmar Brunton Australia and The Future Place UK . It showed people like face to face groups most (51%) and telephone interviews least (12%). The researchers were surprised to find people's experience of online research communities was not as positive as expected with only 39 per cent saying they liked their involvement.

However, people involved in the Swarovski Innovation Research Community reportedly loved their involvement. In a paper titled ‘How to be successful in co-creation research', we learnt that activities undertaken in the online community included a design competition, discussion among members and voting. The researchers tracked which crystals online community members used in their watch designs. There was clearly a great deal of respect shown towards the members of this community. A prize of 6,000 Euros was awarded, finalists were invited to a presentation event with exposure to top designers, and two people got design jobs as a result of their involvement.

Quality was the morning theme for day two, and I have to admit to missing the earlier morning sessions as I'd stayed out too late at the ‘tweetup' the night before (a ‘tweetup' is a meeting at a pre designated time and place organised on Twitter). Sessions entitled ‘ISO Standards' are not necessarily something to jump out of bed for when jet lagged. However I did catch up with the quality issue at the Advertising Research Foundation meeting the day after the conference. The AFR has just completed a research on research project comparing 17 panels and found around 16 per cent of panellists were on multiple panels, and that while results within panels were consistent they were inconsistent across panels.

The afternoon sessions focused on the use of mobile phones for research. One of the biggest challenges according to a paper titled ‘Best practices in mobile research' (Vision Critical, Canada) is delivering the questionnaire format on all the different phone configurations.

For all you tweeters, bloggers and internet explorers - there has already been a substantial amount of content published about the conference. Jeffrey Henning published blog posts at each of the sessions at http://blog.vovici.com/blog/ctl/all-posts, which provide a good summary of each session. Check out tweets posted during the conference at www.twitter.com/esoc.

The conference attracted about 250 delegates from 28 countries. It was quite intimate and apparently ESOMAR conferences are well regarded for their friendliness, and that was certainly my experience.

It was wonderful to spend two days listening to and talking with people who are world leaders in their research areas, to hear new things and to be excited about the new possibilities in research.

Christine Walker, Alliance Strategic Research

Read more about the conference on the ESOMAR web site

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