Thus, when it became apparent that the Dutch ‘twitterer of the year’ election was set up by a advertisement agency people began to criticise they way this was set up. Of course it didn’t take long before freelance journalist Bert Brussen announced on twitter that he would take care of organising something more fun. What followed is an example of a typical social media effort.

This is how Twittershizzle got born; an effort to do something fun for twitterers (or ‘tweeps’) that was more than just meeting up for some drinks. You could call it crowdsourcing, but maybe that doesn’t do justice to how these kind of things usually work. With Bert’s following on twitter he quickly gained attention and a buzz of enthusiasm was spreading through the Dutch twittersphere. With friends and colleagues from the Dutch weblog deJaap Bas Paternotte and Levi Boitelle agreeing to help the event was taking shape.

As part of the deJaap editorial board I was happy to do my share in making this event a success. It wasn’t a complete smooth ride, but we all know our fair share of how things work online, so in the end we got it together. Staying true to what we thought would be fun to do, not thinking too much about marketing practices we managed to get it done; #Twittershizzle the Twitter event was born and would take place on the 9th of February.

Word about this event spread quickly, and set up as a free event with artists and musicians participating for next to nothing it became quite something. There was a stream from ‘Ted’, there were paintcartoons, there were writers, there was beer and there was more beer and sigarettes.

(CC Photo by Anne Helmond)

I’ve been setting up meetings for more than 10 years now, from get-togethers in the local pub to lectures, but this was something unique indeed. A nice 300 active twitterers from all kinds of sub groups in the Dutch sphere showed up, along with newscrews from papers, radio and television, trying to see what this could possible be.

Let me be clear, there is nothing wrong with organizing something and making a profit out of it. But especially online people want to participate, not just be bothered with offers or things that they should really buy in to. Or as Bert Brussen puts it:

beware of stains on your purple pants

Personally this all is what I love the most about the internet. You get together with long-time online friends, strangers and everyone in between, while others are still trying to grasp what this is really about. Yes, “the internet really is my thing” and I love every second of it. What’s next? I can say a new Twittershizzle, and plans for international versions of this type of event are uttered, so we’ll see where we stand, tomorrow, next month, next year. And never forget that it’s you, it’s me, it’s us all together making fabulous things happen again and again, sometimes failing miserably, but always creating something beautiful. I hope this will come across on television as bright as I feel it now.

Of course most of the postings about Twittershizzle are in Dutch, but you can search by Hashtag if you’d like and pictures can be found here or here. A nice linkdump with even more and some (Dutch spoken) videos is here on Mark Hulstein’s blog.

I think my main argument for both how Social Research is possible and why it could be useful can be summarized in three main points. I’ve used these three points from then onwards to structure my approach when talking about this issue, which seems to work fine for me now. I’ve made a slide show based on these three main points, which may be nice to share with you here.

First of all of course my three points; these are:

• Explain survey based research; why are we used to it and why are we using it. Is this type of research flawless, does it have any shortcomings?
• The future of research is not about presenting you with the crowd, it’s about presenting you with their opinions. Social research makes it possible to tap right into opinions instead of people.
• We have to set up Research and show it is not only possible, but that it works. Do not wait for demand, be the unique company that can supply this extra knowledge and, in a way, create the demand.

Of course presenting you with this slideshow without me talking might seem a bit useless, but I think you can gather some information from it anyway. And besides; I’m always willing to give ‘a talk’ about this, of course.

CC Photo at the start of this article: Matthew Bowden
The nice picture of me on the fields of HAR2009 at the end of the slideshow, was made by Anne Helmond.

As all of these seem to be happening there is the other obvious solution to which I’ve been pointing several times in the past; several companies ‘chipping in’ together and combine their panel efforts.

And indeed; now several European research agencies have committed themselves to pooling their panels together and create a new fieldwork business called Panelteam. Founding members are Multiscope, Mo’web Research, M3 Research, Panelbase, Directpanel Research and SWG according to Research-Live. Peter-Paul Laumans, now working at Multiscope, will be heading this new company, no doubt having to navigate it to the hard times of crafting a single structure out of the separate panel entities. It will be interesting to see how fast they can set up a smooth working new organization out of these separate resources.

Even more, it will be interesting to see what kind of influence this pooling has on the market. No doubt Panelteam would like to establish itself as an important player in the field, but they will feel the competition of both existing larger multi-country players as well as others pooling together their resources in a similar way. My guess would be that a next step might well be consultancy firms combining some of their research efforts in a similar vein.

Thus I thought it was nice to come across this blogpost, asking how you really treat your followers. It’s a sad thing really, that posts like these have to be made, but I do think they are necessary, even though the answer to what a “good way” to treat them is migth be easy.

The answer I think really is quite simple. Even though I’m not religious I’d like to quote from the Bible for some guidance to basic etiquette:

Do to others as you would have them do to you
Luke 6:31

Yes, this old piece of wisdom still holds value, especially on the web. As Garret points out in his post; you’re not dealing with contacts (or just followers, for that matter) you are dealing with real people. As said;  I think it is a bit sad we have to think about how we should treat other people, but fortunately there are blogposts like these to remind us just a little.

Not just sometimes, but quite often, new media really is that simple. Hold on for just a moment and think about older, every examples of how to deal with people, products or anything else and you will see that even new things might rely on old principles.

But there is more, way more and that is where thoughts of privacy, but also of marketing and research potential come in to play. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has made a website to show a bit of what is possible. (Go support them here, by the way.)

Panopticlick is of course a very clever name in itself, but what does it do? It tests your browser to see how unique it is based on the information it will share with sites it visits. as it turns out, that is often very unique! So someone with access to multiple, if not a lot, websites could, at the cost of quite some server load, potentially track you on your merry way across the internet. This might be heaven for marketeers in some way, but even in this industry tracking to this extend seems to be frowned upon. Cross site tracking cookies have been the topic of much debate, even amongst not so ‘privacy focused’ people, although their existence might prove there is still quite some demand.

Installing a lot of fonts of my system might not have helped for me; when testing it turned out I am very unique. (That is bad if you dislike being traced or tracked, good if you like targeted ads.)

Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 222,512 tested so far.

Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 17.76 bits of identifying information.

This is one of those things that you know about, somewhere in the back of your mind, but may have never really considered as an option. You know about browsers being able to detect if you have a certain font on your computer etc. but how could that all fit together with other statistics? That is one of those things you might not always think about.

Thus the topic might well be; are people aware of the (theoretical) possibilities and are they going to be used? Of course the question still remains; how effective can this type of tracking be? This is exactly one of the reasons for starting this project. The EFF wants to try to get your information and add it to their database. That sounds evil enough, though fortunately we might want to believe the EFF about that “anonymous” thing and them not tracking us, of course. Hopefully, this will help evaluate the capabilities of Internet tracking and advertising companies, a goal which in the end can be beneficial regardless of which side you’re on.

So now you probably expect me to come up with the answer to this question. Well I don’t think there is an easy one and a good answer, if there is a single one, would probably be more like a book than a blog post, so I won give you a full answer here. What I will give you is a little thought I had about the way the broadcast like structure of a microblog like Twitter affects the way of how information is gathered and shared.

Getting information

Let’s say a person, let’s call her Sue, is writing a paper about a certain subject and she is looking for some more information to put in that paper. She will of course use google, her books and things like that to find additional information. Another thing she might do however is ask a friend, John, if he has more information about this subject. Now chances are he knows a bit more and can help Sue, because she will probably have made an educated guess about who of her friends would have some knowledge about this subject. But of course it is also very likely that he doesn’t know anything, or not much more than Sue. She could then call or email other friends, with similar results.

If you look at the picture here you will see Sue asking John for help, but there is also Anne, someone she didn’t ask for help! Maybe she forgot about Anne, or thought she wouldn’t know anyway. But as it turns out, Anne had some additional information all along. Now, of course it’s a big shame that Sue couldn’t add that to her paper, even though she was so close to obtaining it.

Information gathering via broadcast requests

The solution to the problem that one couldn’t possibly ask anyone is of course enabling someone to do so anyway. This can be arranged by broadcasting a message for example through twitter. As you can see, in this new situation everyone receives Sue’s query (they might even retweet it) and the one(s) that think they would be able to help out can respond.

Additional advantages can be gained in situations where Sue is just working on a paper and not calling out for help for any reason. If she does talk about what she is writing, however, people can still offer help. If Sue tweets about the approach she is taking on this subject people might point out mistakes, give information about aspects she never considered in the first place and so on.

So; this makes a strong case for the sharing of information in a 2.0 kind of way! Not only do you get your queries out there to a broader audience, the same audience could also improve your work without you having to ask for it!

There are many reasons to appreciate the efforts of a community managers, but Jeremiah Owyang says it all when he points at four mayor difficulties they have to face. Of these I think the “Seemingly never ending job” and the “Emotional drain” are the most essential. Please remember why you’ve hired these people to do this never ending job and if you think you’re only wasting revenue, rethink your community strategy so that community management will be of value to your organization. Community Managers enjoy your #cmad !

I do think we should look more into some of the things that come to mind when you look at a survey. These things are often related to a certain tradition that lies in doing survey based research and indeed in a sort of tradition that is created per tracker survey as well. Not changing things for tradition’s sake, is one of the worst things a researcher could do and still this seems to happen all too often. Survey methodology in general is one thing, but a lot of me wondering about survey research is the lack of changes, of innovation.

Tradition

If any objections about wording, questions, long surveys and tradition sound familiar to you, you may have read Jan Hofmeyr’s (Synovate) Research Magazine interview where he comes up with similar notions. He describes in an honest and clear way how tradition seems to hold the Research Industry hostage some times. An excellent example is about brand tracking; surveys in these studies seem to be way too long, which makes response and dropout rates suffer and will of course cost the researcher way too much money. Still companies seem reluctant to step forward and possibly lose half of their income and clients seem to be reluctant because the ever present danger of losing the budget for your department if you seem to be able to spend less this year! Quite a classic way of holding on to traditions for little more than some sort of business continuity reasons.

To these observations I would add that an other reason is often because one likes to compare studies. This, of course, mainly concerns tracker-like studies. Questions can sometimes be added, but clients could be very reluctant to remove any, or even improve the wording because of reasons like “this has been running like this already” or “we want to compare this with 2001”. In these cases, the question of course is whether comparing “bad” data (defective, in the sense that Jan is using it.) with new bad data makes sense at all!

Can we add to survey research?

On other point is the research itself; I mean: come on, survey research? Can’t we come up with some nice additions to that? Well, of course we can, and I believe that we can even strengthen survey based research with additions like these. Still, very little seems under way to do this, even with the “2.0” hype going on like crazy. Now of course I do see the point in no jumping on any bandwagon, but the way clients and others seem to hold to just surveys some times seem to be a bit odd, to say the least. When one looks at comments made by Hofmeyr like

“it’s very hard to get people to change. We’re supposed to be researchers; we’re supposed to care about truth and new knowledge”

and

“Our industry is one of the most conservative you will come across. Look at IT – look how keen they are to throw out the old and adopt the new.”

it’s maybe not that hard to see why a “knowledge” industry seems very reluctant to use any improvements, let alone new ways of doing things.

Being this knowledge based industry I think the ideas, the knowledge, is there, what we have to do now is to use it! This will not happen tomorrow, but if we can come up with a good way of doing “new research” tomorrow, present it next week, clients may follow and demand these things next month, if you catch my drift. I think this is a train we cannot afford to miss or else we might never arrive in the future while others who did “get it” are catching up and do get there in the end. So, of course, proceed with caution, but be sure to catch that mediatrain that will departure very soon or has perhaps left the station already.