Late night clandestine meetings, covert discussions via webinar panels and a flurry of file sharing across the globe. It all sounds like it could be the stuff of a modern day espionage thriller but it’s actually the latest innovative challenge set to a group of carefully chosen research industry speakers, for this year’s BIG conference.
The mission (should we choose to accept it) was to work with three other market research industry workers to co-author a presentation on the subject of social media and how it could be harnessed to benefit the research industry as a whole. The catch, as there always is with these missions, is that the other participants of the presentation are located not just at opposite ends of the country but also on separate continents and the only method of communication allowed to us was that of social media itself.
The project has been funded by Ray Poynter (a celeb within the world of Market Research!) and we have been working primarily on a Wikispace - an online page that is set up by a group of people to share and edit thoughts/projects. We have had weekly webinar chats and have been updating our paper as we go along – again only by using social media and virtual aids. Having one member of the team in India we have had to work extra hard to ensure we can all stay in touch within suitable hours, avoiding midnight chats!
My area of discussion has been in the effects social media on wider society and the research industry extensively, and it is fair to say that the world of market research (in particular those doing business projects) is becoming more daring in their methods of conducting research. I believe social media goes hand in hand with technology and so long as technology advances so will the use of social media, whether people chose to use it or not there seems to be no way to avoid it.
In this regard social media also seems to transcend barriers of age, socio-economic background and current occupation with as many CEO’s using platforms such as LinkedIn and Twitter as there are of the younger generation; the more traditional group of early adopters. In this sense social media provides a potent mix of potential respondents for not only initiating contact, but for also using it as a means of communication. This seems to be one area in which the research industry in the UK has been slow to realise.
Social Media is definitely here to stay. More and more companies are embracing the power of the virtual world and with technology constantly advancing I believe it is only a matter of time before the ‘techno-phobes’ within the industry will grab their iPad’s and join a fan page online without a second thought!
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