Digital Ethnography

In an IPSOS study using the Techneos mobile platform, hundreds of smartphone owners have been asked to participate in a mobile digital ethnography study, sharing their feelings, photos and other ‘point of experience’ information that will track how the general public interact with the British Monarchy at the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Katherine Middleton.

The study will be used to gather information in real time on people’s perception leading up to, during and after the event.

Rather than coding the social media content that is freely created, the mobile survey, which is optimized for smartphones, asks direct questions about where people are watching the Royal Wedding to their mobile enabled panel.

The survey asks respondents how they feel about the British Monarchy, who they’re watching the Royal Wedding with and to take a photograph with their smartphone of what they can see now.

The information is uploaded in real time using the respondents’ mobile network carrier and their smartphone - whether they use an Android, Apple iOS, RIM or Windows Mobile operating system.

The mobile survey is taken by each respondent multiple times over the course of the day on their smartphone mobile device. Within the app they capture photos, GPS location and answer survey questions that you’d see in a typical ethnography project. The information will provide real time data on people’s thoughts and experiences that is not possible to be captured in real time using other research methods.

“We’re excited to be working to be working with Ipsos Open Thinking Exchange on this once-in-a-generation project,” said Dave King, Techneos CEO. “On Friday many people will be sharing their thoughts on social media through their mobiles. Ipsos went one step further and used our SODA app to gather structured data from people who are in London watching the wedding, at the point of experience, unobtrusively, in real time.”

The results will be published after the project has been completed.

A mobile digital ethnography project of this kind is particularly well suited to the United Kingdom, where smartphone penetration is at 31% (Ipsos Media CT Report Q1, 2011).

Will you be watching this historical event? Where and who with?

Techneos’ Vice President, Sean Conry and AJ Johnson, Vice President at Ipsos Open Thinking Exchange have won the Next Gen Market Research Disruptive Innovation Individual Award for their collaboration in the area of self-completion mobile digital ethnography. 

Sean Conry and AJ Johnson utilized the Techneos SODA® solutions suite to combine quantitative and rich qualitative data collection across multiple mobile OS platforms via research Apps.  They leveraged mobile data and GPS location capture with unstructured data such as photos to gain a deeper understanding of people’s moods, environments and decisions.

Their research enabled people to provide insights and share opinions when and where it was important to them and challenged current methodological views of the role that respondents can and should play in research.  Their groundbreaking study also challenged assumptions of “typical” consumer segments, as well as which segments could be targeted using mobile methods. 

For more information about the NGMR Disruptive Innovation Award, click here. 
 

[We're] working with the Pivot technology to organize data collected via digital ethnography research. We're also exploring coding the photographic data so that brand exposure can be grouped by mood, environment, or any other datapoint [collected]. The results were presented at the CASRO conference in New York earlier this year. Other clients of ours have been doing more experimentation since the technology is so promising for market research and insights.

For more information see:
New Dynamic Data Tools for Market Research and Digital Ethnography

BSkyB, O2 and Pfizer are among the big-name companies shortlisted for this year’s Research Magazine Awards.

The trio have been nominated along with Capital One, Channel 4, Digital UK and Guardian News & Media for the inaugural Best In-House Team award, which recognises excellence in clientside research.

Best Innovation also makes its awards debut this year, replacing the prize for Best Research Breakthrough which had been awarded in previous years.

The companies shortlisted for the Best Innovation Award:

BrainJuicer for SatisTraction
Conquest for InfeXious
Face for RT02 (Real-Time 02)
Firefish for FishEye
Hall & Partners for Engager
Ipsos and Techneos for work in mobile ethnography

To learn more about Ipsos and Techneos, their work in mobile ethnography, please click here.

See the original post:
Shortlists revealed for Research Magazine Awards
 

In a recent blog post I wondered about who was going to tackle the issue of new multi-faceted datasets that incorporate rich media like photos alongside traditional survey answers. Aside from the sheer overwhelming nature of these datasets, the industry is crying out for non-static dashboards and reports as opposed to the tried and true PowerPoint file & stacks of cross-tabs (this was driven home as a major theme at the recent CASRO technology conference).

At that conference I showed how we used Pivot by Microsoft to dig into quali-quant ethnographic data from a recent diary research pilot project. It’s very cool – I recommend checking it out. Microsoft is releasing a way to integrate Pivot “collections” as they’re calling them into Silverlight Websites! It’s a way to share meaningful data in a cool and informative way like I’ve never seen before. (p.s. a big thanks goes out to Candice at Luminosity for pointing me towards this…)

… And if you like that, check out SeaDragon, the underlying technology. This 6 minute overview from the TED site will blow your mind.

Lastly, it looks like there are some new players in this space in MR. I learned about Cognicient, a UK company that specializes in dynamic dashboards for longitudinal data.

Connect these tools to your survey system, and you may just tackle that data yet!
 

We're presenting this week at the CASRO conference with Ipsos. We worked together to field a mobile, self-initiated digital ethnography with users who have Blackberry and Nokia phones. We think it's the first study of its kind, and I wanted to put down my thoughts on why we did it.

With all of the press that Apple creates, I think most people can intuitively guess about the 'how' of mobile research. All modes have their use. It ranges from quick polls via SMS, to mobile web through to Apps.

Quant Scale Qual... I thought that sounded more elegant than "Qualnt - the new Quali-Quant". 

What happens when your diary studies routinely generate 2000 completes? Or maybe they're not "completes", but life blurbs, media micro blogs, or any other new research thing you can invent a name for. Our clients are starting to work through these issues, and companies like Language Logic provide a great starting point with tools that broach predictive/automatic coding and easily handle multimedia data formats.

But multimedia data is a complex beast. It may take Google or Apple to bring us the tools we need to get over the automation hump. For example, check out Google’s face detection technology and iPhoto’s Faces technology.

How this could be licensed, bent, twisted or re-purposed for research is yet to be seen… but the possibilities are exciting and I can't wait to see who solves it first.

1. Augment traditional survey questionnaires with photos and locations to enrich data and drive new insights
2. Greater mobility means a higher likelihood that respondents will have the ability to take a survey anytime, anywhere
3. Time & location stamps give higher confidence that data was entered where and when it was supposed to/reported to be
4. Real-time data allows for compliance monitoring
5. Eliminate the problem of recall

Scenarios which can benefit significantly from a mobile survey system include:

·         Detailed Category Interaction (diary studies)– EG. Snacking/Eating:

o   Where and when did you eat? Why did you choose what you did? What options were available? How did you feel? Show us what you bought/made?

·         Consumption/Usage that happens anywhere, or where location affects choice:

o   FMCG, or disposable consumer goods

o   Tobacco & Alcohol (typically done in academic or social research settings)

o   Diapers

·         Understanding a day/week/month in the life of a respondent segment:

o   GPS capture for significant insight in to patterns

·         Shopping/Retail:

o   Exercises to create outfits, or understand how segments choose where to buy different articles of clothes

o   Pseudo-mystery shopping (audit retail vendor knowledge or Sales Rep attention to customer)

·         Medical:

o   Physician Drug rep encounters

o   Prescription/consumption and results of regulated products

·         Exploratory & Innovation. Perhaps most valuable for dynamic, important or changing segments:

o   New parents, Brand Mavens, Primary Grocery Shoppers, Baby Boomers

·         Advertising and Media Exposure:

o   Where & when did you see advertising? Show us the ad. How did it affect you?

·         Mobile populations, or users of a product or service that by definition is mobile:

o   Frequent fliers / Airline V.I.P.’s

o   Commuters /Heavy Transit Users

o   Sales/Service Reps

• Apple: since its release, the iPhone has set the bar for smartphone usability; its slightly thinner sibling, the iPod touch, is the definition of a sleek, modern Personal Digital Assistant (PDA); and the forthcoming iPad is one of the most anticipated products of all time. Simply put, Apple has a lot of swagger and momentum in the mobile space. But Apple runs a very closed environment that people either love or hate, and this creates opportunities for other more open platforms to shine. Also, while Apple has done very well in the consumer space, it has made fewer inroads into the enterprise, where RIM and Microsoft thrive.

• Research in Motion (RIM): the BlackBerry is one of the most impressive brands of our time. While RIM is often considered less marketing savvy than Apple, I would suggest that their marketing tactics have been every bit as effective as Apple's -- just different. Despite a barrage of criticism about the sexiness and usability of their products, RIM continues to grow and profit at an astounding rate. I personally questioned the usability of BlackBerry products compared to more elegant competitors like iPhone and Android, but I have come to appreciate them as solid, enterprise-worthy devices, and to see the company as a very savvy player in the mobile space. RIM has developed very deep roots with both wireless carriers and enterprise IT departments, as well as a powerful brand that is almost synonymous with thumb-typing on a mobile phone.

• Nokia: the Nokia/Symbian world is complicated. Having personally handled dozens of Nokia phones, I would summarize that their strength is in their diversity of offerings to multiple levels of the marketplace. This is also their weakness. With countless products, three current operating systems, and a solid-but-aging feel on much of their hardware, it is hard to believe that Nokia still outsells its nearest smartphone competitor at more than a 2-to-1 ratio. But while they are not as strong in North America, Nokia is a major player in Europe and downright dominant in many other regions of the world. It is hard to discount a company that produces over 1 million phones per day (yes, you read that correctly). With the incredible depth of carrier relationships and distribution channels which they have developed, Nokia's challenge now is to fill those channels with products that compete with their ever-growing range of competitors.

• Google: Google has garnered a lot of attention since announcing the open-source (and freely available) Android platform in 2007. By providing a smartphone operating system that is free and extensible, Android has garnered support from dozens of handset manufacturers including major players like Motorola and HTC. In contrast to Apple, Google's greatest strength (and weakness) is its openness. I am personally very impressed with most of the Android devices I have used, and as a consumer I have great optimism that Android will be a force to be reckoned with in mobile technology. But I also recognize that openness can lead to fragmentation, and I've heard a lot of grumbling from developers about the lack of standards on Android devices. As Microsoft learned when it allowed device manufacturers and wireless carriers to customize experiences based on its Windows Mobile platforms, I believe that the many emerging flavours of Android devices will make it difficult for developers to target. That said, I believe that Google's ability to integrate the mobile experience with all of their other web-based services will make it a formidable player in the mobile space, and I believe the fragmentation issue can be overcome as Google and other Android licensees learn to coexist.

• Windows Mobile: I recently spoke about the forthcoming Windows 7 Phone Series, so I won't repeat myself on the details. Suffice to say that I think Microsoft has re-entered the mobile race, and demonstrated that they are not planning to turn away from this increasingly important battlefield. Microsoft has learned a lot of lessons over more than a decade in mobile computing, and I believe their enterprise roots will serve them well as they re-assert themselves with a brand new mobile platform. What remains to be seen is whether Microsoft can garner enough consumer interest to unseat competitors in the mass market, or whether it will continue to play a more niche role as an enterprise solution.

• Mobile web browsers are improving in capability and usability, and are finally emerging as a lowest-common-denominator approach to mobile engagement. If you need to reach a lot of people in a relatively shallow way, e.g. to conduct a brief mobile survey about a product or experience, then a mobile browser may well be the way to go. Although mobile browsers are still fragmented, the emergence of mobile web technologies such as HTML 5, JavaScript, CSS and Adobe Flash are making it more viable to reach a wide mobile audience.

• Downloadable applications provide a richer user experience for applications such as diary studies and mobile panels, but they are typically harder to deploy to a broad range of users. Also dovetailing with Sean's recent post about quality over quantity, I would argue that in many cases a more select audience that is highly engaged is more valuable than a broad audience that is minimally engaged. It is these cases -- for example digital ethnography with alarms to trigger highly contextual questions at random times -- where mobile apps really shine.

• Over one in five U.S. households (20.2%) are cellphone-only, an increase of 2.7% over six months ago.
• One in every seven homes (14.5%) took all their calls on cellphones despite having a landline.
• More than three in five adults living only with unrelated adult roommates (60.6%) were in households with only wireless telephones. This is the highest prevalence rate among the population subgroups examined.
• Nearly two in five adults renting their home (39.2%) had only wireless telephones. Adults renting their home were more likely than adults owning their home (9.9%) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.
• Men (20.0%) were more likely than women (17.0%) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.
• Adults living in poverty (30.9%) and adults living near poverty (23.8%) were more likely than higher income adults (16.0%) to be living in households with only wireless telephones.