Welcome to the Listening Post!

Industry Attitudes towards Social Media Research Practices

Tweet

 

Last month, the American Marketing Association hosted a webinar, "Excuse Me! We're Having a Conversation Here!" about Vovici research into consumer attitudes towards social media market research. As part of that webinar, we surveyed attendees about how they thought researchers should behave when conducting such research.

Here are some demographics of the 226 attendees who provided valid responses:

• 93% live in the United States, with the rest in Canada, Mexico or Brazil
• The top job responsibilities of respondents were marketing (62%), strategic planning (20%), product development (8%) and sales (5%)
• The top three industries represented were marketing research (19%), financial services (11%) and health care (6%)
• Respondents worked from organizations of every size, with 23% working for firms with fewer than 10 employees up to 12% working with firms with more than 24,000 employees.

After recapping four common areas of debate for the ethics of social media research, we asked respondents to let us know their own views on the best practice for each area.

• Respect/ignore expectations of privacy: 60% of respondents said to respect consumer expectations of privacy, while 26% voted to ignore privacy concerns (14% had no opinion).
• Cite/obscure identities of commenters:  53% of respondents voted to obscure the identity of social media commenters when reporting their comments, while 26% were in favor of reporting the identity (21% had no opinion).
• Seek/don't seek permission: 50% voted to seek permission to quote social media commenters, while 33% felt no need to seek permission (17% no opinion).
• Engage/don't engage with commenters: 59% of respondents voted to engage with commenters, where 24% were against such engagement (17% no opinion).

The good news is that for the most part these answers match up with consumer expectations, though consumers tend to feel more strongly than the industry about most issues (for instance, 85% of consumers surveyed in our social media listening survey want to grant permission to have their quotes used, while only 50% of industry respondents want to seek permission).

The primary area where the industry disagrees with consumers is around engagement: while 59% of consumers surveyed are willing to engage with organizations they comment on (matching the industry response), that number drops rapidly when contacted by other groups. Only 15% of surveyed consumers want to engage with independent market researchers. The percentage willing also declines rapidly from 59% depending on the social media site, as brands are not magic words inviting responses from firms to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter status updates.

With only 19% of industry respondents voting with the majority on every question, there is still plenty of room for debate about the best practices for social media research.