Thank you, everyone, for taking the time to meet with us.
As Brendan said, my name is Annie Pettit, and I'm the vice-president of research standards as well as the chief research officer at Conversition, a Canadian start-up specializing in social media research. Because I'm seen as a global thought leader in the social media research space, ESOMAR in Europe, the Council of American Survey Research Organizations, or CASRO, and the Marketing Research Association, or MRA, the MRIA's counterpart in the U.S., each invited me to be a contributing member of their social media research committees.
To give you a sense of the role that social media research is playing in the market research industry, I would like to share with you just a few results from the spring 2012 “GreenBook Research Industry Trends Report”, a survey of more than 800 market researchers around the world. Of those researchers, 28% have used social media research, 59% plan to use social media research next year, and more than 10% say that social media research is one of the greatest opportunities for researchers in the future.
Social media research is defined as the application of traditional market research principles to the collection and analysis of social media data for the purpose of better understanding policies and opinions. Just as survey researchers use survey data, social media researchers use social media data, and we apply the same strict methodological practices to that data.
For instance, as with traditional survey research or focus group research, just as survey researchers decide which people are best suited to participate in a survey, social media researchers decide which websites or online forums are best suited for understanding opinions. We incorporate traditional aspects of market research, including sampling, weighting, scaling, norms, and box scores to ensure that we measure opinions as accurately as possible.
The main purpose of social media research is to better understand the opinions people have regarding policy issues, products and services, celebrities and politicians, social issues, and cultural activities. Social media research helps us learn what people like and don't like so that we can improve the services and products people receive, create better products, and better serve our constituents.
Most importantly, social media research is not a kinder, gentler word for social media marketing. We do not market products; we do not sell products. We, like our counterparts working on the traditional side of the industry, conduct market research. We abide by and respect the same methodological and ethical guidelines and standards as traditional researchers.
I'd like to share with you just a few examples of how we abide by those principles. First of all, we take great care to only collect public data. Some websites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, hide portions of data from outsiders, including Google. If you were to do a Google search, this data would not be found. Social media researchers do not and in fact cannot collect this data. In some cases we could just create a password and collect the data, but we don't; we respect that privacy.
Other websites allow anyone to read the entries. Comments left on YouTube, Flickr, or WordPress are written for strangers to read and enjoy and can be found via a Google search. This is the type of data that social media researchers collect. In addition, we depersonalize data that is shared in reports. We do not engage with social media users without their consent and we do not knowingly collect data from minors.
The Internet has evolved rapidly in recent years. Ten years ago it seemed incomprehensible for the average person to share intimate details of their life online. Today, bloggers are regular people who get excited when strangers, not their friends and family, read their thoughts and share them widely. Public forums are open social networks where strangers from around the world find and share opinions with each other. Twitter is a newer entrant into the social media space, and for many people using it, the ultimate goal is to read a tweet that millions of people around the world will read.
Social media has become so ingrained in our lives that users expect companies to respond to social media comments written in obscure corners of the Internet. People expect their social media complaints to be met with letters of apology from the companies they write about.
Right now, Canada is one of the global thought leaders in social media research space, and I'm proud to represent Canada in that role. But I worry that if we lose this position, if we are unable to compete in the social media research space because our privacy standards restrict us rather than let us self-regulate, our clients will have to use social media research conducted in places with less-than-high ethical standards. That scares me.
Let us be thought leaders. Let us continue to lead in the social media research space. Let's demonstrate to other countries that social media research can be conducted in a way that is beneficial to the government and corporate decision-makers, to research companies, and most of all to Canadians.