Sneak Preview: Instant Research Communities Officially Launch At The End Of March!

Extra Support: Seeing stars (and giving them meaning)

A few months ago GutCheck implemented a system for rating respondents. Not only did this allow us to understand why certain chats were ‘bad’ and ‘good’, as time goes by it will also allow us to see which respondents have repeat positive or negative ratings.

Now, you can also track your transcripts through star ratings. This will allow you to isolate the best chats, and save the less vocal respondents for later analysis if needed. This quick, at-a-glance reporting is meant to save you time when sorting through data for patterns and verbatims.

We’re always eager to understand more about how our community of researchers is making the tool work, and what kinds of things we can do to improve. Leave us your product feature requests at our community page, here. And, as always, let support know if you have any issues with the tool!

Happy chatting!

Eavesdropping with Social Media: Opting in and Opting out

Last week, the news that Linkedin would be opting users into social advertising was met with a lot of warnings: “UNCHECK THIS BOX!” and “Linkedin thinks it’s Facebook!” were just a few. And it’s true — Facebook really has set the tone for opting users in to social advertising and third party promotions. In the marketing realm, another question circling around social media is whether or not “social listening” is ethical.

In a paper published by Materials Research Society in the UK, the organization states, “In short, because information can be found it does not mean it should be used for research.” MRS made a list of ethical and legal arguments against the practice, the first on the list being “user expectations and terms of use.” They quote Facebook’s terms of use as follows:

“If you collect information from users, you will: obtain their consent, make it clear you (and not Facebook) are the one collecting their information, and post a privacy policy explaining what information you collect and how you will use it.”

This short hand overview of informed consent is set out to protect users, who have a certain expectation of privacy. In other words, they share their interests because they believe those interests are being shared with friends. Just because the information is out there, they don’t necessarily know how it might be used.

For this reason, many users are against having to use their legal names online. Specifically, danah boyd recently argued against the Google mandate to use real names online, calling it an abuse of power and a way of silencing those who might want to adopt pseudonyms for privacy. Bernie Hogan also articulates the idea of user expectations and online vs. offline behaviors, writing “You are not online when you are in front of a computer – you are online when your actions are being digitized and networked. Online is on-the-record. Offline is off-the-record.”

Aside from the idea of establishing a “safe” sharing space (with privacy) online, MRS quotes the Nuremberg code (as any academic researcher had to memorize and understand thoroughly in order to go through Institutional Review Boards), laying out the principle of voluntary participation. That is,

“…The person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision.”

This is why doing academic research with children takes so much time — research participants have to go through many levels of consent in order to safely communicate with their subjects. Going through the IRB is full of red tape, but it’s there to protect participants and to prevent a slide down the slippery slope from “they pretty much understand” to “they don’t even know we’re watching.”

image via https://fittoprintfilm.wordpress.com

The other side of this coin, however, will show that users do volunteer information online, which is considered by many a public space. Digital MR writer Michalis Michael argues that the online space is a realm of performance, and that people use social media in order to be heard by the public. He writes:

“A garden can indeed be private; a public twitter account or a facebook fan-page is not. It is clear to the user, and if it isn’t it should be, that anybody has the right to read their comments and re-tweet (giving credit to the author) their tweets. As a matter of fact the writer in the majority of the cases, if not all, wants people to read their comments.”

Similarly, Ray Poynter argues that if researchers abide by “old” ethical standards, “…they will not be able to compete for business in most areas where market research is growing. This is because there will be no commercial benefits that will accrue to sticking to rules and ideas that nobody else does. To stick to out-dated rules simply provides a worse service for clients. Rules have costs, they only work when they also confer benefits.”

Dr. Annie Petit has also been following this topic and asking for research input on the subject. Through her account we found many arguments for and against setting standards, including a great post from Brian Tarran at Research Live, and also a link to CASRO’s call for comments on its draft for “guidelines that provide an ethical framework for research work performed within the unique formats, behavior systems, terminologies and varied privacy expectations of the social media space.”

So what do you think? Do users online deserve to know if they’re being listened to? Should they opt-in or opt-out of social listening? And what kinds of systematic changes would this mean for social networking sites and marketers alike?

Targeting markets by race: authenticity and transparency

A couple of months ago, Tim Peterson wrote about the problem of marketing to specific races — not just recruiting, but also making sure messages are not boiled down to the point of stereotyping. This feeds into the question of exploitation, including using cultural holidays and symbols to sell to a specific market.

This issue touches on a larger question — a question that involves ethnographers, sociologists, and market researchers alike. How do we, as researchers, work outside of our subjectivity?

Google “ethnography + subjectivity” or “ethnography + authenticity” and dozens of academic studies show up. How do we study cultures other than our own without “Othering” them?*

According to Peterson, “be transparent about it.” In other words, it’s ok to say “we’d like to increase our brand’s presence among Hispanics.” That’s what targeting by demographic and segment is all about, afterall. Tip-toeing around race makes it even more of an issue, whereas being upfront and acknowledging a person’s subjectivity lends a moderator credibility. I’d much rather know a company needed to know my opinion because they were interested in increasing visibility among white women in their 20s than have them sneakily tie in questions about the early 90s and how into Titanic I was in 1999. Right?

Additionally (and I’ve been campaigning for this since college [and by "campaigning" I mean "talking about how problematic it is to my coworkers"]), Peterson makes a great critique of the boxed identity problem. He writes:

“Use any consumer interaction with your brand to ask for demographic information but don’t use a drop-down that limits responses to “white,” “black,” Asian,” “Hispanic,” etc. Instead you should let the consumers fill in their own identities, be it Hispanic or Latino or South American or Ecuadorean or Californian. This will give you an idea of how consumers want you to perceive them, and with the right opt-ins, could give you peeks into the behavioral differences among Hispanics and Latinos and South Americans and Ecuadoreans and Californians as they relate to your brand.”

Bingo! Let people define their own subjectivities.** Ask people open-ended questions and dig deeper about where their interests come from. The question of race and ethnicity does not have to be touchy — we’re often just too scared to get it wrong to really focus on doing research right.

*For further reading on the concept of Othering, check out Edward Said’s Orientalism (a synopsis here) and bell hooks’ essay “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance”

**For more on drop down menus and critical cultural analysis, please check out Lisa Nakamura’s “Menu-driven identities: making race happen online” in Cybertypes: Race, ethnicity, and identity on the Internet (2002). It’s a great read.

NYT: The Online Looking Glass

Yesterday’s New York Times Op-Ed by Ross Douthat explains that social media exacerbates egotistic, self-centered behavior. And this is the first time anyone has ever said something about the “Facebook Generation” being narcissistic, so I was stunned! The funny thing about “The Online Looking Glass” is that it accuses the Facebook generation of narcissism while using the 46 year old Representative Anthony Weiner as its exemplar. And while there is certainly something to say for a generation of people who grew up always connected and always prompted to share (and yes, media does affect our messages), I still believe that chalking it up to narcissism is too easy. I believe there’s more there.

I spent the tail-end of undergrad and then all of graduate school working with adolescents to understand how they were using social media — mainly because I didn’t want teens to be without an advocate or a voice in this debate. And while it’s necessarily true that there’s a certain emphasis on the self while using social media– it’s my belief that the self is communally constructed in this generation like never before. We aren’t inwardly focused when we post links, photos, videos, status updates — we’re really focused on The Other and how we’re going to engage our followers, our friends, our online communities. We want reactions and we want conversations. We are cool if we know what’s going on around the world because it means we know how to use social media to be social.

danah boyd, who is one of my intellectual mentors and an inspiration to anyone interested in how teens and adolescents use OSNs, recently posted a work-in-progress paper to her twitter. Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens’ Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies, discusses how teenagers, while they don’t have the social agency that adults have, do have an understanding of how privacy works. The problem is the chasm between their media literacy and their agency — they are living in world where attitudes, practices, and strategies toward privacy differ largely depending on generational understanding of the very word. Additionally, a lot of people in their 20s don’t have access to the Internet — and Facebook is a global network. Isn’t calling out a specific US American, socioeconomic, group being a little short-sighted?

So, while the point of writing an Op-Ed column is to make a very specific argument and stand by it, I always take pause with labelling certain generations with such negative connotations. Indeed, at 25 I’m part of the me generation — a generation that the NYT also claims “doesn’t want to grow up” but then refuses to acknowledge how we’ve come to where we are. Contrary to what many think, my friends would kill for a job with 401k and health insurance guarantee, but too many of them simply can’t find them and have to string together part time jobs. Many of us don’t think that the Tao Lin/ Megan Boyle/ Bebe Zeva phenomenon speaks to us. Most of us roll our eyes and then worry about paying our rent.

What do you think? Is this argument tired? Is it as black and white as it seems? Is there more to the story? Is everyone narcissistic and we’re all going to cave inward from the pressure of our own, sad unexamined and superficial lives?

**Follow danah boyd here. Read more about my research here, and comment below!