We are a specialist social media research agency

Creating new insights and different perspectives from the natural conversations taking place online.

We help people think differently and act differently.

Social Media Research

The comments that people make every day using social media can be an amazing resource for research. They can help us understand what people think in an entirely new way. For the first time we can learn from thousands of natural, unbiased and completely freeform discussions about life, brands, the universe and, well, everything.

These comments differ from traditional market research data in a number of important ways:

When used in the right way, we know that this social media data can help firms think differently about their consumers, markets or competitors. This is Social Media Research.

Think different

We can help you think differently. We bring together machine search with human understanding in a way that creates different perspectives from huge amounts of social data – quickly and cost effectively.

We’ve developed an approach specifically designed for interpreting social data based on:

SEARCH
Social data can come from a range of sources: tweets, blogs, forums, social networking sites, innovation or research communities etc. We’ll either work with your existing data or use our social media monitoring partner to search open social media sources for relevant content.

This search scans over 80 million websites globally, looking for content that matches our subject of interest. This could be based on a brand (e.g. Nike), a category (running) or a concept (exercise). Content that matches our search criteria is then collected ready for the next stage.

SORT
For research, the strength of machine search is in its ability to quickly and efficiently find relevant content. But this isn’t enough. When you look closely you see that what’s right for social media monitoring is often not good enough for research. Even with the best search terms, you’ll get duplicates, false positives and data that simply adds nothing to your understanding.

We’ve developed an operating model that allows us to analyse and interpret data far better than any automated service could, whilst still producing results quickly and cost effectively. Our team of analysts read and sort each comment, assessing it for fitness to contribute to the research.

SENSE
To make sense and properly interpret these comments you need the right analytical framework combined with specialist research skills and experience.

We apply Grounded Theory as the framework for interpreting social data and drawing conclusions from it. This approach involves the systematic discovery of theory through the analysis of data. A data set (obtained in the search phase) is systematically coded and then categorised through an iterative process with a hypothesis emerging through the process of analysis.

Underpinning this approach we use Discourse Analysis techniques to help interpret the comments in a structured and thorough manner. Discourse analysis provides a series of tools and techniques to help the researcher understand and interpret how humans make meaning and communicate across different groups.

BENEFITS
When compared to more traditional forms of research, this Social Media Research has a number of advantages, it can help you:

Act different

Research isn’t about information or data, these are just tools. It’s about helping you see tomorrow differently from today. It’s about new ideas and different perspectives. It’s about inspiring people to do things differently.

We know that social media research can help you think differently. But we don’t want to stop there, we want to help you inspire your team or colleagues to act differently too.

Our researchers will have at their fingertips a deep understanding of your consumer’s opinions and feelings. We work with firms to help you make the most of this.

We can be your critical friend, sounding board or voice of the consumer. Bring us into workshops or let us run them. Don’t let the research debrief be the end of the process, we can help bring the research to life and create your action plans with you.

Some examples of this include working with:

Projects

Our consultative background allows us to provide added insights to any research project in a whole wealth of areas.

We provide insights in the following areas:

Client work: social media research case studies

We’ve helped innovative companies (like Microsoft, EON, and Havas International) fill gaps in their consumer insight and using Social Media Research.

You can find out more about some of our client work by following any of the links below:

Social media research case study – Microsoft

Social media research case study – EON

Social media research case study – Money Advice Service