Oscars

Can the Oscar’s Remain Deaf? – Oscar Buzz Awards Post 1

• Date February 07 2012
• Posted by Ben Turner

Face is proud to announce the Oscar Buzz Awards! This is Face’s very own Oscar awards ceremony where YOU, not the Academy, will decide the winners! This special multi-part blog series brings an element of democracy to the four most hotly-debated awards of Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Actress and Best Supporting Actor and Actress. It will also show, in a pretty fun laidback kind of way, how we at Face use multi-method research to answer complex and relevant questions.

One part of our research strategy will be monitoring the social media world, hunting for mentions and monitoring the sentiment around the nominated actors and films (as well as those beloved actors and movies that were overlooked!), but we are also employing an integrated research approach, to truly get to the heart of who you, the movie-goers, really think should win.

This first post focuses on the reactions we’ve seen to the nominations. This is always a point of contention and this year is no exception. In the best actor category we saw close to 7000 tweets from aggrieved fans on the top 5 most mentioned actors who missed out, in just two days following the announcement of nominations.

But before we go any further, who made the cut?

Whilst a number of these nominations were fairly predictable with The Artist and The Descendents touted to do well and coming away with two and three nominations each, there was also a number of contentious oversights.

Twitterers were most aggrieved by the overlooking of Ryan Gosling and Michael Fassbender for the Best Actor category.

Potter fans also voiced their opinion in supporting Alan ‘Snape’ Rickman, whilst being disappointed the franchise as a whole was overlooked.

We have also tracked the nominations people were most surprised by.

What came out of the sentiment from both the snubs and surprise nominations was a clear sense that the Academy has their favourite actors and actresses and this was biasing the nominations.

The major movie blogs have also strongly voiced their opinion of a sense of bias and foul play this year.

“I know the academy has a reputation of being biased, but, wow, did they screw up big this year,” The Good 5 Cent Cigar.

The question is though, are people getting tired of the Academy being deaf to the views of the public? And is it a driving force in the declining viewing figures of the ceremony?

“Two years ago, the 80th awards set the disappointing record of being the least viewed ceremony domestically – 32 million viewers. At the same time the talent show American Idol was getting around getting 30 million people tuning in” Channel 4 News.

The trends in TV generally do not look good for the Academy’s big night. The two major trends continue to be reality-based, with participation-based reality competitions such as The X Factor, American Idol and even renewed interest in the Big Brother format drawing in millions. The other more recent reality TV trend is the new form of pseudo-reality TV, with The Only Way is Essex and Geordie Shore leading the way in the UK, inspired by the likes of Jersey Shore and The Hills from the USA. Both of these reality TV formats combine an element of glamour with a sense of accessibility for the viewers – something that may be lacking in the current Oscars format.

The view people have of the Academy as a closed circle, elitist and biased, is in stark contrast to these other growing popular TV formats which people can engage with much more directly. However, the Oscars this year are stepping up the dialogue. Fans are running a very active Twitter account and micro-site featuring the feed on the Oscars site called Oscar. This should help viewers to feel more engaged with the awards. It is also supported by a number of blogs and an Oscars app providing a much more holistic way of engaging with the build up. But will this be enough?

Do you think people’s dissatisfaction with the nominations is driving declining viewing figures? Or is this awards format being undermined by the reality TV?  What could the Academy do to correct this? Would a people’s choice award undermine the whole thing or drive engagement?

Blog, Jobs@Face, Social Media

Emerging Roles Profile: The Social Media Researcher

• Date January 27 2012
• Posted by Chris

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.

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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, Co-Creation, Community Management, SMinR, The Future

Five Emerging Roles That Are Changing the Face of Market Research

• Date January 23 2012
• Posted by Job

Following on from my last post – 2012 Resolutions for the Market Research Agencies – I wanted to talk more about how we make these resolutions a reality by creating new agency roles with distinctive new skills sets.

1. Technologist

The MRX Technologist is primarily responsible for keeping up to date with new digital trends and is able to help the agency develop and pilot new research methodologies. This may take the form of designing new platforms from scratch or being the lead decision maker when it comes to buying 3rd party software. Alongside innovation, the Technologist plays an increasingly important role on project teams where the research briefs are UX or Service Design Orientated.
Skills: User Experience, Digital Project Management, Data Analytics

2. Community Manager

Communities are social places and need to be nurtured by people who are experts in digital communication. With the rise of MROC’s the fastest growing role in MRX agencies is that of the community manager. In fact, most of the problems associated with bad MROC research is when the agency does not have this person on the team. The Community Manager is responsible for setting the rules of the community, setting the tone of voice, making a personal connection with members and ultimately ensuring good quality engagement with the project. The Community Manager is also increasingly leading the way when it comes to applying game mechanics to research and is growing in influence when it comes to shaping research projects.
Skills: Copywriting, Video production, Project Management

3. Social Media Researcher

Real time social media monitoring is now commonplace but many companies are still struggling to interpret the data and use it to make strategic decisions. This knowledge gap is being filled by The Social Media Researcher who is responsible for developing strategic KPI frameworks for social media tracking programmes and harnesses social media data to help answer adhoc brand, product and comms briefs. The Social Media Researcher is quickly becoming a very important role, as they are both an objective and strategic voice advising clients about the ROI of their growing digital spend.
Skills: Quantitative Research, Qualitative Research, Social Media strategy

4. Co-creation Consultants

Companies are opening up and embracing more collaborative ways of working with third parties – including their consumers. Co-creation Consultants are responsible for the successful interaction between all parties on a project. Many of the touch points for this type of co-creation occur in workshop environments of one kind or another that require very skilled facilitation to get the best out of a wide variety of participants. Co-creation Consultants cover a wide range of disciplines, most often those from innovation, brand strategy and planning backgrounds.
Skills: Facilitation & improvisation, Planning, Qualitative Research

5. Big Data Scientists

We are living in the age of data, enabling companies to be more forward looking. Big Data Scientists are hot property in the research world as they are responsible for developing predictive data models & algrorithms using a wide range of data sources including dynamic social media data. Big Data Scientists primarily come from computer science, hard sciences, engineering and business backgrounds.
Skills: Mathmatics, Statistics, Computer programming

Blog, Co-Creation, Communities, Insights, SMinR, Trends

2012 Resolutions for MR Agencies

• Date January 12 2012
• Posted by Job

1. Learn how to tell better stories

We all know a good and engaging story when we hear it and our clients are no different! 2012 should be the year in which we take the art of MR storytelling seriously. Let’s ban the 100 slide reportage debrief and develop the skills of our teams to communicate findings in more engaging ways. Spend 10% more time on thinking about how we tell the story using imagery; video, graphics and customer voices will make a huge difference to the reputation of the MRX industry.

2. Ask less questions and listen more

As researchers we like asking questions. If we are totally honest, most of us think we know the answers before we run our surveys and are simply testing our hypotheses. Today, we live in the age of social media data – consumers globally are talking about every aspect of their lives 24/7. We no longer need to second guess and ask as many questions about what consumers think and feel with so much data available. We just need to develop the skills of our teams to listen and interpret more.

3. Stop using the word respondent

We have all done this. But is it not time to stop using this word to describe people who we work with in research projects. In 2012 we must encourage our teams to develop collaborative skills so that we can see consumers as people who we can co-create value with rather than as lab rats to carry out tests on.

4. Have more fun

The MRX industry has a pretty dull image and we need to ask ourselves why. A large part is because we need to try harder to be creative and have fun with our clients. We should be encouraging our teams to spend time experimenting, by piloting new ideas with clients. In a world where things are changing so fast, this is not only essential but fun.

5. Don’t just embrace change – drive change

Above all in 2012 I think there should be an acceptance amongst researchers that the pace of change we are seeing in technology is just going to speed up and that the old certainties of Quant and Qual research are over. It is only then that we can help shape the skills of our teams to adapt to the challenges of a world where so much data is available and where consumers expect to collaborate with brands.

Blog, Co-Creation, Communities, Insights, Social Media