Site Blog

Powers of observation - post by Annie Petit

18-Aug-2011

Great post by Annie Petit reminding us that observation is part of qualitative research and reminding us of the criteria laid down by psychology professional bodies about observation of people in public places. If following the MRS discussion paper about online data and privacy we classify the internet as a private space then none of what Annie proposes applies. We would be observing people in private and would have to obtain their permission first. But if the internet is a public space and the same rules for observation apply then there is no reason why we shouldn't read and report on what people have posted without identifying them or obtaining permission from them.

The force of Annie Petit's argument is that observation needs to be protected as a legitimate activity. Which is part of research.

Cracking the codes..

10-Aug-2011

MRS, CASRO and ESOMAR (in partnership with CASRO) have all put out codes of practice for privacy and the collection of online data. Cloud 7 on Aug 31st will be our opportunity to discuss these. The exciting part is that the MRS are defining the whole of the internet as private and all those from whom you collect data as de facto respondents and yes you have to ask them first. Let battle commence!

CASRO want responses by Sept 2nd. the MRS by Sept 16th

Marketing Society discovers the Cloud

05-May-2011

On Tuesday May 3rd - I spoke about the Cloud of Knowing project to the Digital Leaders dinner a quarterly event run by the Marketing Society - a group of very senior marketers who gather to debate digital topics - uppermost in the discussion was the ratio of the time spent getting something out of social media in particular and the commercial value of it. I talked about Digividuals - research robots - about using research communities to tag content, about doing qualitative pilots to determine the conversations and the keywords in them before putting the computers to work. And lastly about the possibility of treating all online content as contextual or behavioural data. It seemed to go reasonably well - I keep forgetting that for those of us who have debated these issues they seem normal. To those who are less familiar some of this talk can be rather esoteric! I've been asked to contribute a Blog to the marketing Society blog on the topic - I've invited them to the May 19th Cloud 6 meeting just set up. It would be great to get some budget holders to comment on what would be worth spending budget on and what wouldn't!

Context again..

02-Feb-2011

Bit of a follow up to last night's discussion at Cloud 5. I spotted this interview with a planner at a digital agency stateside who was arguing that the communications planning task is all about understanding context now. Enjoy!

Cloud of Knowing paper wins Best New Thinking - MRS awards 2010

13-Dec-2010

A back dated post to note that the Cloud of Knowing paper given at the MRS 2010 conference this year got awarded Best New Thinking. I hadn't expected it because the competition was tough this year but I take it as an award for the group as a whole since the ideas came directly from the papers discussion and inventiveness of group members. Great to get recognition from the research fraternity for the project but even more special to have so many supporters and encouragers cheering us on.

Digividuals Webinar

03-Nov-2010

I sat in on a rather early webinar today which Chief Juicer John Kearon was running at 7am from his home in Cambridge. The topic Digividuals - research robots which Brainjuicer are now touting as a brand new research methodology. In Cloud 2 they were a central topic of our discussion. Called Demographic Replicators their creator David Bausola a member of the Cloud of Knowing group was beginning a collaboration with John Kearon another member of the group. And the result has been digividuals. A year on there are a string of casestudies and well known brand names who have experimented with them.

I'm not going to explain what digividuals are. John does it much better than I can. What emerges from the webinar is that Braimjuicer has managed to navigate away from the dangerous shoals of stalking people and stealing their data. Because the digividuals collect internet content from all over they don't track individuals. What is collected is loosely representative but at this point John really treats the data as stimulus for researchers to then develop hypothetical products and then generate insights from these. In short it doesn't matter if the digividuals reflect actual people or not and on balance it is better than they don't.

One of the most interesting claims John makes is that digividuals could replace research groups as a surer way of generating insights. So the battle is on!

The other really interesting idea that came from the webinar was the idea that once you have your digividuals up and running you can subject them to all sorts of indignities like Christmas shopping or losing their job. So the creative potential is considerable. You can log onto the webinar here. There's a film which aggregates the content collected by one of the first digividuals a designer type called Nicole who lives in Hammersmith. She even has her own route to work - trackable on Googlemaps. She even has an Ebay account of her own. And Nicole is a research bot made up of a few lines of code. There's also another film of David Bausola and Will Goodhand who want to Casro Tech in New York last June to launch Digividuals there.

Digividuals can be seen all sorts of inteesting ways. They are a landgrab from quant into qual. It will be interesting to see how many clients switch qual budgets across to this. Or if attracts money from entrely different budgts altogether.

Research conferences and all that

17-Sep-2010

I had a curry last night with Steve August of Visions Live just visiting London after ESOMAR Athens on his way back Stateside. Which reminded me of the various conferences we have rattling around - wherepeople who have got involved in Cloud of Knowing are prominent by their presence!

Annelies Verhaeghe of Insites Consulting who will be bringing a paper to Cloud 4 was in action at ESOMAR. As were several from Brainjuicer. I notice that both Anneliese and myself (and Christophe?) will be on the platform at the MRS Social Media conference the day after Cloud 4. So that will make interesting watching because I'm still not sure what is going to be discussed on the day!

And I thought I would remind you that submissions for the MRS 2011 conference need to be made to the MRS by the end of September. Here are the details.

Hope to see you next wednesday John G

Cloud of Knowing paper at MRS 2010 conference

27-Mar-2010

This is a backfill. I suspect I was too frazzled after the conference to remember to write it up here. I presented a paper called the Cloud of Knowing in the Future of Market Research session on the 2nd day of the MRS conference. It was tough to take a 6,500 word paper and break it down to what I originally thought would be 20 minutes then 15 but then was told had to be 12. This was one of the issues with the conference this year - lots of presentations but not a lot of time for presenting and even less for questions and debate. In the event my 16 minute presentation seemed to go well. The questions were around the newly revised Research code of practice. Which takes no account of the use of research robots. I argued that we need a code of practice but it is almost impossible for regulators to keep up with innovation on the internet.

Regarding the robots - this was the first time they had been publicly mentioned on a conference platform. John Kearon aka Chief Juicer and a member of the Cloud of Knowing group - had given me permission to say that Brainjuicer is now experimenting with the robots known by Brainjuicer as Digividuals. And working with Kraft on using them. Which meant that what might otherwise have seemed a rather theoretical concept now had a practical application but for most there had emerged completely left of field. Later that day Will Goodhand business development head at Brainjuicer pitched the Digividuals as a concept at the Dragon's Den session which closed the conference. So there appeared to be 2 independent mentions of robots in the same day - making it one of the hot topics at the conference.

When the awards shortlistings were announced it was very gratifying to be nominated for Best New Thinking and for Best Presentation. Particularly the latter since trying to introduce transmedia, text robots and probabilstic sampling and tagging in 15 minutes meant that my slides were quite desnse. So much so that the chair of the session Rita Clifton had joked that I would be offering a free slide by slide afterwards. Clearly my presentation wasn't as obscure as she had anticipated.

I'm not really sure where to log the Cloud of Knowing paper - it emerged far too quickly and under time pressure when the original idea was that it should be the output of the group working together. The good news about the publishing of the paper at the conference and its shortlisting is that it helps to put Cloud of Knowing on the map. I'm hoping that at our next meeting there will be some new curious faces willing to join in.

Graeme Lawrence of Virtual Surveys invited me to give the paper again at the Northern MRS event - highlights of the conference so we may be on the way to bulding a Northern cloud fraternity as well!

What I would like to make very clear is that this paper was not the point of the project. It is work in progress and I look forward to many more papers, meetings and discussions about using web content.

CRM - VPI Volunteered personal information and privacy

05-Feb-2010

Here's a presentation by Alan Mitchell which has been put on the IDM website. Its relevance to Cloud of Knowing is that the MRS paper I have now submitted concluded that CRM may be a more fertile place for content analysis to reside if research proves too finicky and regulatory. After all all these territories feed into decision support and clients may be less worried about where their information comes from. So I was intrigued about how CRM might be self policed by customers holding onto their own data and sharing and updating it. Permission and privacy being themes which need sorting out. Even if the regulatory cops tend to shout no and ask questions afterwards. I was amused that after posting about some of the issues that went into my paper last week on my blog I was sent a press release by the PR agency of the MRS.. about privacy and data protection and impending EC legislation. For my information.. And I didn't even have to ask!!

MRS paper here we go here we go

28-Jan-2010

First of all grovelling apologies not to have involved you all more regularly - we should have had the opportunity for at least one face to face meeting since the last despite the onset of Christmas. I have been rather pressured into providing outputs feeling I should have worked harder to get inputs from all of you. I had a great conversation with Surinder Siamat this afternoon which was really helpful - thank you Surinder.

The deadline for the Market Research Society Conference written paper is Monday (gasp). I will do my very best to circulate a draft of the paper end of play tomorrow to give you the chance to comment on structure and content. Which leaves me Monday to knock the document on the head.

You will have caught the drift if you've seen either the webinar I gave for the IE business school or the powerpoint (if you hadn't got an hour to listen to me burble through it) the links are in a powerpoint in the scriptorium.

I plan to set up a face to face meeting in February when we can talk about which ideas to feature in the conference presentation - which is only 15 minutes after all. And also to talk about one of the ideas which is Demographic replicators - search for the term and you can learn more about these as social media bots and their potential use in research. There's a blog dedicated to them.

So.. wait for the paper - your inputs please finishing line on Monday and a meeting in the offing. Speak soon.

IE Business School Webinar

20-Jan-2010

Today I ran a webinar on my current thinking about Cloud of Knowing for the IE business school where I am a visiting professor. I teach the online research component for their digital marketing masters. The deck is I'm afraid too big to upload to the Cloud of Knowing site but I was able to put it up on slideshare. And there is also a link to the recording of my webinar. You can find both in the document called Cloud of Knowing Webinar Links in the Scriptorium. The deadline for doing the written MRS paper is due at the end of February so I am being forced to progress my thinking without the input I was hoping for. If you do have time to go through the deck and have questions, comments or suggestions then I would love to hear them. I have suggested 2 prototype hybrids of research and content one using the Purefold jetengine model and the other using Demographic Replicators.

Getting rid of the sampling bottleneck

06-Jan-2010

Research has a strange hangup with sampling. The selection of the right people is kept separate from the content you want to get from them.Which is understanable but has become a limitation. Because it has conventionally been kept physically separate. In this post I want to suggest that sampling could become more dynamic. Which would move research a lot closer to the gathering of analytical content which has almost no sampling discipline applied to it at all. One of the reasons research is so different is because of this sampling discipline which is part of the bedrock.

Quantitative research surveys tend to collect the information about who you are at the end of the survey because its dull and being factual you may be too wearied from the survey to bother to embroider. It is very clear which are the classification questions to be used for weighting and cross tabulation. And which is the content which will be carved up.Qualitative research takes a lot of trouble to make sure you are the right person before you start the research at all. And in analysis much is made of the distinction between process data and content data. The bits of the research interview (or group) that are identified as being linked to the dynamics of the research process itself - these are discarded as contaminated. It could be the warm up for the group or something a respondent agrees with which is reckoned to be a part of the group dynamics than a sign that person B agrees with person A.

want to suggest that using two parallel tagging systems that we could make sampling dynamic and apply it to web content. Sample tags would be used to identify who is the author of the content. Content tags would be used to identify the content. Although a lot of data might carry both tags the same data item should not be used for sampling and content because that would be bootstrapping. This approach would have to be probablistic - because it is unlikely that we would ever have enough information from sources of internet content to identify them (apart from asking them to complete a sample frame questionnaire of course) - but I''m trying to avoid this because it would turn content analytics into a different way of recruiting online respondents - great content - can you fill in this survey? Similar to scoring models used in direct mail which use detailed information about a sample to make intelligent guesses about the propensities of people living in similar types of houses or buying similar branded goods.

The sampling bottleneck which we need to get past is analogous to the Van Neuman bottleneck which was a major step forward in computing. Before Van Neuman computer designers used two different types of data - control/instruction data and content which the instructions worked on. . The old knitting machines programed with cards are a hangover from that period. Even though Alan Turing's original concept paper showed that a symbol processing machine could handle both in the same medium. What Van Neuman suggested was that data be stored in memory and be acted upon using a CPU which applied programming instructions using the same medium. No more knitting cards. And computers have been designed the same way every since. The instructions and the data have been in the same format stored in the memory and processed in the CPU. I am suggesting that sampling and content needs to go the same way. Drawn from the same source and handled as part of the same medium

word candle craphs

10-Dec-2009

This is a follow up to the topographical oceans chart which suggests that it would be an interesting experiment to set up candle charts (you can find these in Excel called stock charts. For keywords.to see what range they move across in terms of how often they are used on the internet. And how often they are used. Would the volatility or kinetic potential of a word be worth collecting as a predictor of how well a word of mouth campaign was likely to be. Or are there other measures of word popularity we should also consider?

Measuring social media - Kaushik's Occam's Razor blog

08-Dec-2009

This is by way of slamming down a reference to Avinash Kaushik's blog so you can keep track of it. He is a guru of web analytics. What makes him interesting is that he is good enough to step away from clicks and to propose integrating a trinity of data sources - clickstream, business outcomes and surprise surprise customer research. I want you to take a look at his blog post on measuring social media which is notoriously easy to do and difficult to do well. He is working off piste but his lucidity is really helpful. What I got particular excited by was tweetpsych. A tool which aggregates a ton of tweets and then generates a psychological profile. Kaushik dismisses sentiment analysis pos/neg tweet classification as twaddle. He's looking for analytical tools which can pick up irony, emotion, making authoritative statements - content of that kind. Which tweetpsych appears to do. I commend it to you.

Topographic ocean dictionary

03-Dec-2009

Sorry - I've come over all Roger Dean. I'll b dusting down my old vinyl Yes Albums in a minute. But its just that I suddenly had a thought that if we have all these measurement tools grinding away.

Then for every word in the English language we have a score extending back several years on how how that word has trended. Some words trend a lot more dramatically than others. But I would have thought that the vector that a word travels through is reasonably stable. There are levels it can go up and down to. But there are other levels it will never reach. This becomes a kind of magnetic resonance map of the language. And if we artificially reduced it to a 5000 word vocabulary - (simple option) or a volatiliy index (the most exciting 5000 words) then wouldn't we have a brilliant way to predict the viability of social media campaigns because we would know the tolerance parameters of the words they were drawing on.

Its a bit like Fourrier analysis which basically deconstructs any curve into the component curves of which it is an aggregate. Which is how statistical modellers work out which factor is contributing which bit. At present we are looking at campaigns as discreet events when really we should be building a map of the entire linguistic field. ocean thingummy. Does this make sense or am I raving?

Google Analytics Illegal says German Regulators

02-Dec-2009

Here's the headline on the Research Live site. Just to remind you that Google Analytics is a tool which allows you to monitor your own site or anybody else's for a fee. And to gather behavioural data which might allow you to identify web users who don't have the option to opt out.

Now the Germans are notoriously sensitive to data issues- they have the toughest direct mail regulations in Europe (opt in is standard for example). It matters because on the wild frontier of analytics, data doesn't care who finds it. Having to filter data by regulatory authority based on where the web user or website so we can give them an opt out. is a potential nightmare. And now that Google has announced that it will limit the number of daily free news items for the news sites in an effort to stop the newspapers opting out of Google altogether there are worrying signs that walls are starting to be built. The value of analytics largely consists of how easy it is to get hold of. Analysing it is where the hard work is. If getting hold of it becomes twice as difficult then a lot less clients are going to want to use it.

Tweetcloud - analyse a twitter account

30-Nov-2009

Just found Tweetcloud via Tim Wright known as moongolfer on twitter - thanks Tim. Its an application that turns your tweets into an idea cloud going back a day, week, quarter, 6 months, year. And at 3 levels of resolution. Very very simple. Now as long as you can set up a twitter account or a list then it would seem to me that this is a very easy way to be able to monitor the keywords that it generates. Or you could set up twitter accounts for people for a particular project and ask them to use it. Then use tweetcloud to do the first pass on the headlines. Is anybody aware of other tools like ideaclouds that could be used in this way. Apparently the developer has done the same thing for Facebook. The graphic is my first as @johngriffiths7covering a year at medium resolution - which I don't find particularly illuminating - but that probably demonstrates that eclectic posting strategies don't tell you very much!!

Cloud 1 ..

23-Nov-2009

is a wrap - a select group met on Thursday 20th thanks to all who came. You can find my notes and the slides on the Cloud1 page

Google Wave - killer research app

13-Nov-2009

No I'm not showing off but I have got my hands on it at last thanks to the lovely Beth Carroll. Would be interested to know how many members of the group have tried Wave yet. To summarise the experience I recommend John Wilsher's blog this afternoon which explains why its a weird product launch because once you're in you have almost nobody to use it with. Which kind of destroys the point.

Why am I blogging about it? Because Google Wave is potentially a killer app for research. For the last 2 years I have been running training sessions doing pros and cons for chatroom versus bulletin board research and Wave has eliminated the distinction. But because it also allows you to embed other objects - projective material and any other structured inputs you could wish for can be put into it. And I presume this means also outputs so voting can be embedded as well.

Would Wave be a suitable vehicle for dumping RSS feeds before the community get to work sorting? Dunno need to think about that.

And as soon as Google are forward thinking enough to allow me to invite others I will of course let you know and you can trial it yourselves.

Gender guesser - autoprofiling web and blog posters on the net

13-Nov-2009

Now we're getting somewhere. The Cloud of Knowing project has 4 components at present (though you might want to challenge and amend this this coming Thursday)

1/ content identification and retrieval - to a wiki or friendfeed type place

2/ Tagging probably working alongside respondents

3/ Grading (probably working alongide respondents

4/ web user profiling - the ability to guess who people are without having to ask them.

Here's a little gem from No 4 which I picked up this week from Andrew Walmesley's Marketing column

Check out http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.html#Analyze a simple free tool which you can paste some text you've written into it and it will guess your gender. (thought I do like the get out clause they put: Weak emphasis could indicate European. Welcome news for eurosceptics!

Now this is a very basic idea but clearly if there are a series of tools which with reasonable confidence can establish not only demographic iidentity (which is hard) then behavioural profiling is in the bag because it is much easier. What I mean by this is pattern of site visiting, location, level of IT expertise, what they find interesting, what bores them. Those are much easier to guesstimate.

So if these tools work and we have a big enough data set for each web poster we follow, it is possible that we could identify a group of blog/website posters by topic and then use the tools to construct a sample frame.Yes? What do you think?