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Guest Blog Post by John Song, CEO of Intrepid & Jen Kersey, Market Researcher & Anthropologist, Intrepid.
Customers do not live their entire lives offline and products do not exist exclusively offline. With exponential growth in the volume of conversations happening online, how do we provide actionable insights from all this data?
Enter virtual ethnography. Virtual ethnography is a research methodology that explores culture online through listening and experiencing. Approaching social media collection and analysis with an ethnographic lens provides clients with a holistic view of their market, their product, their site, competitor landscape, and more.
How can one approach research objectives using virtual ethnography? Here is out method:
- Define the problem: articulate a clear and actionable brief that creates a framework for the insight – the problem can be about a population or a specific topic (for instance a product) or online space
- Find the people: define the participants that can most effectively shed light on the questions
- Plan the approach: how do you keep stakeholders on the same page while allowing for the necessary flexibility in your process? Agree on an agenda that includes the mode of data collection – this keeps the team focused during data collection but is flexible enough to allow for ad hoc opportunities and paths. Leverage social media monitoring tools, like SM2, to help you collect and manage the vast amounts of data available on the social web
- Collect the data: now that you understand the problem and have a plan, you’re empowered to determine what is relevant and what is not. Words and media are captured using software and thus can be analyzed just like interviews
- Take it offline: validate your findings through more traditional methods like focus groups; this also gives you the opportunity to compare and contrast what is found online and offline (which can sometimes be surprising!)
- Analyze and interpret opportunities: dive into the insights with workshops. In the end, tell stories with a clear set of ‘A-Ha’s and next steps)
- Share the insight: finally, work hard to make the outputs accessible, engaging, and meaningful
Jen and John will share their approach to virtual ethnography and will illustrate their experiences with a case study they conducted for the marshmallow candy Peeps. The study for Peeps proved to be very enlightening because it examined social media data using an ethnographic approach and analysis. In the end, it showed that the brand has a very influential subculture that lives both on and offline. Be sure to register for the webinar to see all the in depth results.
John is the founder and CEO of Intrepid Consultants , which was recently acquired by Alterian. At Intrepid, he worked to provide actionable insights from social media data. Before his days at Intrepid, John founded a web analytics consultancy that was later sold to the digital agency Ascentium. Prior to that, he was a minority co-founder and managing director (EMEA) for Noetix, a business intelligence software company.
Jen has had an interest in virtual ethnography since finishing up her MS degree in applied anthropology at the University of North Texas. She has since discovered an unrealized love for market research. Jen has been involved in various virtual ethnography projects and has presented her findings to a variety of audiences.
