October 2012 Archives

In society that heavily relies on short-hand writing, (LOL, G2G) it is essential for researchers to decode these text and discover the true message. Social media networks, allow people to communicate they way they prefer and are comfortable with. The question is, what can infer from Facebook comments or Twitter hashtags. This is where text analytics (text analysis, text mining content analysis) comes in.

Text Analytics refers to the innovative research technique that is a process of deriving high-quality information from text. Text analytics or "text mining" interprets information from patterns and trends within structured data. Researchers then evaluate the output data and interpret the message.

Text Analytics is conducted by word frequency distributions, pattern recognition, tagging/annotation, information extraction and natural language processing.
This modern technique can be used for business intelligence, exploratory data analysis, research or investigation.

MROC's (Market Research Online Communities) is an emerging research technique that allows qualitative reserach to be conducted efficiently, cheaply and deeply online. These communities can be both public and private. These communities are online platforms where participants can share freely opinions and knowledge on brands and brand image.

The benefit of MROC's is that it is basically a focus group on steroids. Researchers can reach individuals from across the globe. Participants are questioned in their own houses. This is a non-threatening/non-intimidating environment where participants can be themselves and offer deeper insights. Another benefit is the immediate results online communities offer. Participants are literally a click away. Internet focus groups are efficient, time-saving and inexpensive research methods.

MROC's can be used to gain information and insights behind (but are not limited to) these topics:
*Ideation
*Testing social media strategy and tactics
*Trend Spotting
*Directional insights when timing is critical
*Exploring attitudes and behaviors
*Testing suitable language for a target
* Campaign development

The research study was conducted by Wilhelm Hoffman, an assistant professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago. The study consisted of 205 participants, who were 18 years and older. The goal of the study was to determine how easy/difficult it is for people to resist common desires.

This was a field experiment in which participants were given a Blackberry phone and told to alert the researchers every 30 minutes if they had specific desires to sleep, eat, have sex, smoke, drink or surf the web.

The Results (common urges reported the most):
1. Eating
2. Sleeping
3. Drinking (non-alcoholic beverages)
4. Use some form of media
a. watch TV
b. surf the internet
*71% to check email, 65% to check Facebook
9. Sex

ANALYSIS:
The result of this study seems to suggest that people are more likely to choose posting on Facebook than having sex. These two activities are so different that it seems difficult to compare them. For example, surfing the web is a public activity while having sex is a private one. I found some problems with the way this study was conducted. First off, the study completely relied on the honesty of the participants. Admitting to sexual desires could be embarrassing to some people, and thus they didn't report it as often as they really did. On that note, what defines a sexual urge? Is it merely thinking a guy or girl is attractive? Or is it actually imagining yourself and some person having sexual relations? And what if while you were sleeping, you had sexual urges, but when you woke up, you didn't remember any of them? This study has content validity because it seems OK from the outside but are really too different to compare.

Check out the article and full results at:
http://www.wired.com/business/2012/10/facebook-is-harder-to-resist-than-sex/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wiredbusinessblog+%28Wired%3A+Blog+-+Wired+Business%29