Welcome to the Listening Post!

Bloggers as Research Partners

Tweet

 

Josephine Hansom, a social researcher with GfK NOP, presented at the 2009 ESOMAR Online Research conference results of qualitative research with ten bloggers.  Key points:

• Confessional Society: A confessional culture provides accessible opinions; people share because an audience is now available that is interested. On 9/30/09 blogging about Barack Obama, people were concerned that other priorities were more important than the Olympics bid, people in other countries felt that Obama's trip to Copenhagen provided an unfair advantage over other competitors.
• The challenge: Deconstructing online opinion, looking at the blogger instead of the blog. The study performed content analysis on 10 blogs, engaged with the bloggers online then talked with the bloggers offline. The blog is different in four distinct ways:  motivation, audience, identity (online and offline identities could diverge) and publishing (attitudes towards security and privacy).
• Opinion sharers: Who blogs? Three types of blogging participants identified in this study:
• The ready-meal blogger documents offline personal interests, has a small known audience but is writing for himself more than the audience, like a diary. He does not identify as a blogger and is security conscious.
• The dinner party blogger is interested in generating interest and interacting with guests (like a dinner party host). She wants to generate and maintain an audience, which has changed her blog from its beginnings as a personal blog. Her online world mirrors the offline world; she has a greater understanding of online publishing than other blogs.
• The lite blogger doesn't see the blog as an everyday activity but uses it when task driven. He is aware of his audience and doesn't share personal data or information that wouldn't be useful.
• Going forward: How useful are blogs as data? The online persona does not always reflect the offline persona; remember the bloggers' potential motivations and concerns about privacy and security. Bloggers merit a reciprocal relationship. When using blogs as research data, recognize the impact of the audience and interaction on what the blogger is sharing. Engage by acquiring bloggers as sample, eavesdrop to analyze online statements, and connect in order to understand context of what is being shared, meeting bloggers half way; only then can we authenticate the opinions being shared online.