A wee rant.  I came across this conversation about online communities on Research Live.  There is a discussion of the pros and cons of research-based online communities, branded online communities, and right at the end a commenter who says that all this community talk is ridiculous and simply listening to internet buzz (via networks like) Facebook is the way forward.

Listen, my children. Many many years ago, I was a wee trainee research manager for a company that did a very boring thing.  We made the fragrances that go into washing powders.    We did not think this was at all dull.  We lived and breathed functional fragrance (quite literally, marketing was right next to the factory).  We researched all sorts of things. We did sensory research, perfume trends research, international laundry research*, brand positioning research.

The one thing we couldn’t do is listen in to a general conversation because for the most part the ‘moment’ we were researching was transient and private.

So it is with many products and brands.  For every Facebook and iPod and Easyjet and Carling Black Label, there is a product which is humble or private or low-key or taboo or just not terribly interesting.  It may be everything to its creators, but it doesn’t generate talk.   This does not stop the producers of these things from wanting to find out what people think.

A research community, like a survey or a piece of qualitative research, is a way of lining up your users and asking them to talk about something they may scarcely think about, day to day**.  When it comes down to it, your customers may have vivid experiences and strong opinions which would never see the light of day outside of the direct conversation between researcher and user, or brand and user.

Don’t get me wrong, online metrics are important and of course you should collect them; but in many cases they will be absent, deeply uninformative or even misleading.   Also: (deep breath) not everybody is online; not everybody important to your category is online.    They’re certainly not all on Facebook.    And I’m flailing in frustration now, but really, systematic research is one of the best methods of finding out what people think of your (slightly boring, not-dominating-Twitter) thing.

*Anyone who thinks that it would be impossible to talk about washing powder for very long is sorely, sorely mistaken.

**For example, blank video tape, back in the day.  Try mining that.

Robert Bain of Research Magazine has a blog post today about the way that business people pick on market research as a way of underlining their modern business credentials.  He quotes a piece by Marc Babej, a marketer writing in Forbes magazine who fixes the passing blog reader with a flinty stare and declares:  ‘You burned big bucks to collect scads of data. Too bad much of it is meaningless.’

Babej’s article is less a research hatchet job and more about ’smart’ research investment: after all, he has a proprietary technique up his sleeve.

It got me thinking about how terribly mouselike market researchers are about critiquing practices in business, marketing and advertising.  Quite understandable, I suppose, when your very existence is down to the buying decisions of those particular people, but I long for a time when research luminaries might wave their hands and say (for example) that modern marketing is dead in the water…

…*crickets chirp*

OK, me first.

Unpopular marketing opinions:

1. Most segmentations are rubbish
2. Customers would rather their product worked, rather than entering into a Brand Conversation
3. Understanding people entirely via the Internet is unwise
4. Data mining is for obsessive-compulsive companies which fear being tainted by physical contact
5. Many organisations are structurally incapable of acting on the insights that their research provides

That wasn’t so bad, although I guess I’ll never work in this town again.

More seriously: should market researchers have an opinion?  I’d like to.  I think it’s necessary, I think it’s absolutely unavoidable; but it strikes me that it can be difficult and unwelcome.

This morning, news came in from the inquest into the death of a 14-year old girl, Natalie Morton, who died shortly after receiving a vaccination against HPV (human papilloma virus).  In short: the poor girl had a malignant tumour in her chest which was undoubtedly the cause of death.

This hasn’t stopped the anti-vaccination squads from speculating about the safety of the vaccine.  The Daily Mail, long-time opponent of most childhood vaccinations (except the ones against really horribly scary illnesses) has already been running a story depicting HPV vaccination as ‘a mass experiment.’   The story has now been altered to reflect the outcome of the inquest, yet the criticism of HPV vaccine remains unchanged.

What is particularly interesting is the comments to the article, which (presumably) span both versions.  There are many commenters fretting about Big Pharma and unknown risks; some of the more recent comments still seem to view her vaccination as the catalyst for her sudden death, because of the suspicious timing.

“I have never heard of anyone who appears outwardly healthy dying within two hours because of a tumour. Never.”

As the comments continue, there are new arguments for and against, from doctors and nurses, and from those with long-term suspicions of vaccination.   In addition to the printed comments, there is a larger unseen audience giving comments the thmbs-up or thumbs down; the unseen audience appears to be more pro-vaccine than anti-.

Another anxious commenter:

“A consent form has recently appeared from my daughters school for this vaccination. I have not consented as she is only 12 and I do not feel that this drug has been tested for long enough. We do not know if this covers her for the next two months or the next twenty years. Too many questions need answering before I would consent to her having it.”

There are quite a few comments of this type, and they present really difficult challenges for a medic to explain.  HPV vaccine appears to be very safe, enough for someone like me (pro vaccine, pro science) to go right ahead.  If you are worried and you’re somewhat suspicious of so-called scientific evidence, you are going to need immense amounts of reassurance, and even then, a large pile of long-term studies may not be enough to change your mind.

I do understand people’s fears, and indeed the power of coincidence in making us look for direct links between events – but I expected more from the editors and headline writers.   There is nothing to be gained from another anti-vaccination campaign.  I’d like to hope that it no longer sold newspapers.

I’m a fond member of the blogging/social networking site, Livejournal.   Over the last few days, I’ve seen the most incredible shitstorm unfold, over the cack-handed efforts of two rogue academics to research what they were pleased to call ‘the cognitive neuroscience of fanfiction’.

Background

First, a bit of background: Livejournal (one of the original social networks) is a vast and varied set of subcultures, and interconnected blogs, dominated by film, TV, book and gaming fans.    It is more counterculture than culture, really: it tends to be left-wing, creative and anarchic.

One of the many subcultures in the mix is fanfiction writing:  stories that people write using characters from books, film, music and TV.  Fanfic writing is female-dominated, and some of it (but by no means all) is very explicit.   There is fanfic for everything, from Jane Austen through Doctor Who (rewriting the works of Russell T. Davies) to The Mighty Boosh.

Fanfic writers have an odd hobby, but they are a pleasant and literate bunch who are much studied by academics.   In fact, academics (like Henry Jenkins) completely adore this stuff  – it pulls feminism, transgression, social networking and copyright laws all into one place. What’s not to like.

The questionnaire is launched

Anyway, a few days ago a friend forwarded me a link to an online questionnaire that she found intriguing.  It was about fanfiction, it seemed a bit amateur, and what did I think of it?   The link was banner-style, and it looked a lot like the Cosmo-style pop quizzes that are memed all over the place on social networks.   There was a reassuring link to a FAQ page giving the names of the researchers, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, and their academic affiliations at Boston University (the BU links no longer exist).  This page also gave a long explanation of their interests in cognitive neuroscience, and what this had to do with fanfiction…

“We’re deeply interested in broad-based behavioral data that involves romantic or erotic cognition and evinces a clear distinction between men and women. Fan fiction matches this criteria perfectly.”

…Uhuh.

The researchers had apparently also consulted a couple of well-known bloggers in the areas, and got their guidance and feedback and endorsement.    Apart from the fact that the academics weren’t making the changes suggested, it all seemed fine.

The online questionnaire itself (captured here in two parts on an LJ Dr Who site – you may see an generic age warning for content on some LJ pages) was a rather different story. I took a look.  There were  70 questions in all (one per page), starting with some brusque questions about one’s gender, age and ethnicity.   It even asked for your SAT scores.  The questionnaire proceeded to a number of fantastically detailed and rather odd questions dealing with fanfiction reading habits; and then it got heavily intimate, asking (amongst other things), exactly what kinds of sexy stories the respondent read and (deep intake of breath) whether they ever had rape fantasies.

The questionnaire… does not go down well.

The questionnaire was barely up before LJers started complaining about the content.  LJ people love to complain at the best of times, and there was a lot of ground to cover here:

a)      Terrible questionnaire design

b)      Inaccurate, amateurish and homophobic wording

c)      Prurient lines of questioning

d)      No attempt to screen out under-18s

e)      Lack of the usual information on privacy, anonymity and confidentiality

f)       And (my favourite) frequent criticisms of the methodology.  How in the name of heaven the researchers were going to draw any valid conclusions whatsoever about subcortical processing, given their data collection methods?

What the researchers hadn’t bargained for was the thoughtfulness of the response.  Livejournal people are a fairly literate bunch.   Stuff like feminist analysis of television casting decisions is a walk in the park for many of them.   At least some of the people who came across the questionnaire were social researchers, lecturers, feminist academics, and indeed neuroscientists.  They didn’t like what they saw.

Ogi attempts to engage with respondents

The lead researcher opened a journal (now showing a single entry, an apology) for the purposes of answering questions about the research; and in the space of about two days, that journal moved from polite, rather subservient requests for clarification, to a full-on flamewar, as the lead researcher put up his questions for comment. As he engaged, he revealed more and more of his (very strange) thinking (he’s deleted his comments on this thread, but you can work some of them out), and his subjects began to research him in earnest.

Google is your friend (and Wikipedia, and Youtube)

Turns out, Ogi Ogas had forgotten to mention a few things:

1. He wasn’t actually affiliated with Boston University any more
2. While they were indeed neuroscientists, their Ph.Ds were on visual processing and artificial intelligence
3. The lead researcher’s Ph.D was funded by the US Department of Homeland Security
4. The lead author gained earlier infamy as a successful contestant on the American version of ‘Who Wants To Be a Millionaire’

And, last but not least, there was another teeny fact missing:

The authors had just signed a substantial book deal with Penguin for a popular science book entitled: ‘Rule 34: What Netporn teaches us about the brain.’

(As one commenter put it: ‘What? You think we can’t Google?’)

(NB – the literary agency has changed the book title now, to ‘Rule 34′)

So they asked about these Netporn theories, and then the shit really hit the fan.  It’s hard to follow the logic, but his theory (screencapped here)  drew on data-mining of adult sites aimed at men, and posited that explicit fanfiction for women could be equated with male interest in male-to-female transsexuals  (?!) and that both of these things could be used to model subcortical processing (whatever that is) in male and female  brains.  Or something.

Somewhere around there, people stopped arguing with him and started taking direct action.  The academics started complaining to Boston University, the creatives started creating cat macros, the neuroscientists started writing long introductions to neuroscience and the specialists in gender identity just started screaming.  There were a few more updates, and then Ogi locked his journal.  He issued a few wandering emails, and removed most of his journal (and indeed many of the comments that he’d left elsewhere).  Naturally, the LJers (being used to the ways of flamewars) took screenshots of the more alarming content well in advance.

Aftermath

From beginning to end, Ogi Ogas maintained that he wasn’t doing social research, he was just collecting data.

The day after the shitstorm, someone reported their conversation with the University of Boston’s rearch ethics board: he wasn’t formally affiliated, and he didn’t have ethics board clearance.  His university pages have now disappeared, the questionnaire is down, and at time of writing, he seems to be deleting all his comments elsewhere.

On the face of it, this is simply an extreme example of shoddy and unethical  research which will reflect badly on anyone who tries to do research online, especially within a community or subculture.   Anyone who approaches that particular community in the future is going to encounter deep suspicion.

It goes further, though.  One of the very odd features of the whole story is that Ogi Ogas and his colleague took a lot of care to approach prominent people. He got a great deal of help from some of them (he also got a magnificent brush-off from one, but that’s another story*).   All of those people are writing to explain that he seemed genuine, and they trusted him.   They offered the same critique of the questions that anyone would.  He seemed to listen, but went ahead with his own version.  This is either arrogance or sociopathy.

One of the people he approached has written to apologise for being taken in, and to reprint some of their correspondence.  She warns him that his attempts to research this particular community are probably dead in the water.   In his reply to her, he’s chirpy.

‘Eventually we’re going to go through this all over again with the far right. It will be interesting to see who throws the meaner punch.’

And I’m left thinking: is this the ultimate troll?

The book is due out in 2010.

*My favourite part of these people’s very lengthy smackdown is the grand postmodern refusal:

‘And so we decline to be interviewed by you; we decline to be the objects of your fascination; we decline to be naturalized; we decline to allow our political project to be cited in support of the very discourses we are trying to question.’

ETA: When respondents bite back

I actually hesitated in writing this up, because I was worried that mainstream researchers will see this as a distant kerfuffle in an unlikely subculture.   But I agree strongly with the writer at the Rough Theory blog (see below), who suggests that Ogas may fail to take valid community criticisms seriously, because he has so thoroughly Othered them as respondents.  In other words, ‘they’re so weird, we don’t have to be careful with them.’

The second general learning point for anyone thinking of attempting a controversial online questionnaire, is how quickly things go viral.  Ogas was terribly happy about the response rate (reliability and validity were not a concern); that same speed of process led, very rapidly, to critique, opprobrium, and direct action.   Before you engage?  Do us all a favour and go on that Methodology course.

Some other quick links:

Rough Theory’s roundup

Unfunny Business’s summary of the whole mess

Feminist SF

Jonquil’s thoughts on respondents who bite back

Back from holiday.  I’ve been sceptical of the whole value of the ‘brand conversation’ movement for a while now, and if my recent holiday taught me anything, it’s that brands are about the harsh (or sundappled) reality of the brand experience…

So. Ryanair.

Is there such a thing as a toxic brand?  Ryanair seems to embody the modern fuck-you brand:  it is supposed to deliver low prices etcetera etcetera, yet it does so in a way that frequently alienates and enrages the end customer.   I don’t suppose Ryanair does qualitative research (ya think?), but if I were to do word association on the brand, the first thing that comes up is dread.  Fear of being caught out, being late, having too much stuff, doing something that invokes their legendary customer service response.

We spent quite a time in our last couple of days worrying about Ryanair’s luggage policies.   We travelled out on Easyjet: 20 kg per person, pooled allowances.  Three bags (for 4 people) weighing around 65 kilos.  Ryanair thinks differently: 15 kg allowance, 1 bag per person, no pooled allowances in a family group, and a charge of £15 per additional kilo.

We’re ever so clever, though. We saw that one coming, bought another cheap bag and dumped all the heavy stuff.  It’s quite tricky to weigh your bags when you’re on holiday, but we reckoned it was all fine, and when I saw people ahead of us at check-in being asked to pay extra, I felt quite smug.  As seasoned budget  travellers, we’d worked around that particular difficulty well in advance.

We marched up to the counter clutching the bit of paper with our booking reference details.

…

To cut a long story short, we had overlooked the bit where you are (now) supposed to print out your own boarding card, and when we beamingly showed up, Ryanair wanted £40 per person to print out a boarding card for us.  Forty. Pounds. Each.

Of course, we should have realised.   We were already manically repacking everything, in fear of all Ryanair’s other policies:  this one, for whatever reason, slid right by.  My husband raged and negotiated. We got on.

The flight was OK, unless you count the hardest landing I’ve experienced in years.   At the end of the day, it got us between the places we wanted to fly from,  at a price that started off as budget.

Will we fly with them again?  Hmmm.   For my husband, it’s the absolute last straw, coming upon his earlier experience of being stranded overnight at an obscure airport in Belgium.

I already had low expectations, what with the cumulative hassle of all those separate invisible chargeable details (for baggage, for payment, for checking in) plus all the stupid queuing.  The boarding card charge, though:  that’s a move from mocking your customer’s low-cost expectations to actively humiliating them.  Hard to find a way back from that.

This Tuesday I went along to the Occupational Psychology/Organizational Behaviour catch-up day at Birkbeck and experienced the luxury of a full day noodling around new research concepts and the thrill of hearing the word ‘critical’ from someone else’s lips.

It was an interesting mixture of heavy content and some of the worst Powerpoint I have seen.   Some of the standouts were actually the Masters projects, rather than faculty.

the stand-out talks

Diane Burns presented a nice project based on discourse analysis, looking at the meaning of ‘collaboration’ in a health service setting.  I liked the concept of ’strategic ambiguity’ – the ways in which people completely fail to define what they are doing, so that they can do lots of different things. Or maintain their power, mwahahahah.

Michael Clarke presented a piece (with photos!!) on the meaning of fatherhood for men working in new media.  This was a delightful talk, introducing the ‘hero culture’ of new media working, and the challenge of overlaying identity as a father onto a youth-driven, youth-pretending industry.  Michael’s talk was the one that made me want to run off and check out some theory (on performing identity), because I’m sad like that.

Andreas Liefhooghe (faculty) gave a perplexing talk (with many, many photos) which personally I found intriguing yet profoundly irritating.  He has done a lot of research on workplace bullying, from a critical perspective, and he drew on Foucault to talk about the difficulties of conceptualising bullying – introducing ‘bullying’ produces a bully/victim binary categorisation that casts people into certain roles. OK, it was more complex than that.

The talk was illustrated with lots of still black and white shots of institutions (the prison, the Panopticon) and people as victims.  It felt extremely manipulative, both as Powerpoint and as talk…verging on the Emperor’s New Clothes in the overuse of bloody Foucault…and yet.   In the midst of my annoyance with it, I could see what he meant. The reduction of personal difficulties to simple categories (stress, bullying, harassment) and binaries (harasser-victim) can set off long chains of unintended and unhelpful consequences.

the joy of labels

What he overlooked, though, is the relief in naming something, even if that naming is a little bit wrong.   It is the difference between listing vague symptoms (I’m sure he’d appreciate the medical analogy) and realising that it all adds up to a recognisable syndrome.  Invoking the label creates a positive basis for action, too, even if there are many things wrong in using the label.

and your point?

But, you say, what is the relevance of all this fine theory to anything practical at all?

I think…I think for me, it focuses me on the need to learn about what is there in front of me (in a qualitative interview or in a questionnaire), where the co-creators of the study want to push it down some well-worn paths and offer some very familiar interpretations.  Many times, the issues don’t fit those neat categories, and it is very tempting to adjust things so that they do.  So, I’m reminded of the value in hanging onto ambiguity and interpreting the thing, not its reflection or its near neighbour. If that makes any sense.

I just spent 2 days at the British Science Association’s Science Communication Conference.  I haven’t been to this particular shindig in quite a few years; it’s quite a mixture of folk: academics, science popularisers, PR officers, evaluators, artists, you name it.  Five highlights:

1. Tackling obesity through an evidence-based campaign

The ‘Behaviour and Choice’ plenary examined the ‘Change4life’anti-obesity campaign, with input from the Department of Health (who commissioned loads of research), the MRC Human Nutrition Research centre (who converted the science into action points, like reducing your portion size, swapping your snacks and getting 60 minutes of exercise a day); and M&C Saatchi, who developed the advertising campaign.

I had mixed feelings about this one.  It’s working fairly well, God love them, and they have made it highly evidence-based, working hard with the scientists to come up with the best practical advice for families.    The ad campaign and the website (ever seen such an unfriendly domain name?)  seem, um, a bit patronising, and anyone with kids in primary school will know that healthy eating campaigns are two a penny.

2. Getting universities to take communication seriously

After the teeniest conference lunch known to mankind (I had to nip out for a roast beef bap afterwards), it was on to a giant session on the ‘Beacons for Public Engagement’ programme.  This is a complicated set of partners basically trying to get universities to become more committed to explaining themselves to their publics.    The Beacon universities (about 7 of them) are doing this through Action Learning projects, inventing change processes that will enable universities to embed public engagement in what they do.

The speakers were gung-ho and very committed, and were clearly getting a great deal out of the project.   It was a little harder to see what was going on, from a more distant perspective.  As with Change4life, one of the biggest difficulties in evaluating these kinds of projects is that the institutional participants find it life-changing.   One has to be careful that personal fulfilment isn’t obscuring the larger view, which is that you’re actually talking to an external audience and their opinions are what will ultimately count.

3. Evaluation and the power of Three Letter Acronyms

I joined the Evaluation breakout session, as a matter of duty, because, well, evaluation is one of the things I do in the science area.  Leaders from another Beacon-related project described their gold-plated evaluation concept, aka ‘Generic Learning Outcomes’ and put us into small groups to develop GLOs for some science activities.  My wee group found this bloody tricky, as we kept getting sidetracked by greater issues of Methodology.

I might talk a bit more about this when I talk about reactions to the second day.   There’s no doubt that the GLO concept – essentially, measuring interventions on up to 5 dimensions – is fairly sensible.   However, in our group the real question was how to measure response intelligently, and to some degree the actual content was secondary to getting the method right.

I think what GLOs really need is a bit of a makeover, so that the 5 dimensions look pretty and can be summed up by an arresting 5 letter acronym.

4. Scientists doing themselves: blogs, podcasts and Twitter

Final session of the day was an extremely enjoyable tour around the use of new media in science communication.  I didn’t expect to learn lots from this, but in actual fact it was thoroughly novel and highly engaging.

Ed Yong compared his experience with writing a personal science blog (the very lovely Not Exactly Rocket Science), with the approach required in his day job as one of the blogging team for Cancer Research UK’s science update blog. There are lots of science blogs these days, and they are really filling a gap between the abstract language of scientific papers and the dumbed-down media treatment of scientific issues.

Neasan O’Neill talked about using Twitter and blogs for a highly technical worldwide community of particle physicists. Neasan is a veritable Hydra, with many blogs, sites and Twitter identities all maintaining his community in its various forms.

Chris Smith from The Naked Scientists gave a deeply entertaining talk about his radio show and general empire, which has become one of the top podcasts on iTunes, and has pretty much crashed every server it’s ever run on.

Naked Scientists is extremely silly, has a worldwide audience, a website, a forum, and a whole bunch of stupid kitchen-table experiments that you can do at home. I particularly like the home-grown ramshackle nature of this enterprise, which clearly started as a bit of fun and then grew and grew.  The enthusiasm of the contributors is palpable, pretty much to the point where I want to run off and make my own Research Show. Er.

5. Thoughts;  science campaigning; and the power of dialogic methods

I think I’ll save Day 2 for a separate post.  Overall, I was impressed by the ways in which science communication has matured and professionalised itself.  In particular, there are far more scientists who are involved in communicating their science directly.    Scientists have also woken up to the need for proactive communication to prevent certain ethical debates from going postal: so, for example, there was a terrific report (Hype, hope and hybrids) produced on the scientific community’s response to the Government’s original attempt to clamp down on stem cell research.

Government departments are also far more sophisticated and thoughtful, whatever happens at policy level.  At the evening reception, the Sciencewise report on public dialogue methods was launched.  This is worth a read.  Deliberative methods (typically bringing together experts and the public) are powerful ways of looking at public perception and human response to complex problems, and this report outlines the advantages and the issues very clearly.  A good read for anyone in research, even if you’re not a social researcher.  I reckon a few big brands out there could totally benefit from a Consensus Conference…

That’s it from Day One; I’ll round up the second day soon as I can.

Books in a Stack, by austinevan on Flickr

I’m just starting a new project that involves doing a literature search before getting stuck into interviewing.

I spent untold years doing ad hoc research, in a cab-style ‘take the next project’ sort of way, and I can’t tell you what a complete pleasure it is to be allowed to go and look at the literature.

It’s maybe peculiar to the places I used to work, but there was quite a disdain towards Doing A Bit of Reading, and a complete horror of exerting one’s database search skills with all the Boolean logic which that entails.

Not all projects need much beyond basic immersion in what went before, but I do projects which involve setting up a new Thing, like a framework, as well as gathering data. What I have learned:

4 benefits of full-on research:

1. Not reinventing the wheel. NOT REINVENTING THE WHEEL!!! So many, many things have been done before, some of them rather well.

2. Allowing time and space for you to really consider the issue Nuff said.

3. Constructing new knowledge Outside well-researched topics, typically you’ll end up synthesising information from a grab-bag of odd-looking books, papers, and commentary.  This is marvellous.

4. You can come up with theories and hypotheses! And then test them! Possibly just me…asking the right people the best questions is a luxury indeed.

And so on to …*drumroll*

7 tips for a successful search

1. Join a university library. This can be hard work without current connections, but there may well be a great, relevant library that you can use.  Online catalogues look like the answer to your prayers but in practice can be expensive and difficult to access, depending on the subject area.  Use your academic or professional affiliations to get access to books and journals.  I use the Wellcome Library,  Birkbeck College,  and Cambridge University Library; I also have access to the British Psychological Society’s collection.  Wellcome has a great cafe.

2. Recognise that opinions are legion but facts can be sparse. Most literature reviews outside academia involve several Emperor’s New Clothes moments: typically, the absence of any evidence whatsoever for strongly-held popular opinions.

3. Web resources look infinite but actually aren’t. This is the never-ending Web Ring problem where you chase promising sets of hyperlinks that eventually loop around themselves in a giant spiral of mutual attribution.

4. Look in parallel fields for great answers. It is quite likely that your particular horrible problem has been discussed and perhaps even solved in a rather different field of operation. In my experience, teaching is a completely overlooked source of great information.  Take e-moderating for example: 90% of the problems online researchers face have already been researched, written up and peer-reviewed by academics working in teaching and online learning.

5. Find the official resources. Government sources are excellent and entirely free.  You can find entire datasets this way.

6. Identify the star papers and books as quickly as you can. In any field, there are some essential pieces of reading.  In a brand new field, one of the most useful things you can find is the high-level textbook.  These are your Little Helpers. Love them and treat them well.

7. Be flexible, don’t print out in too small a font, and carry paper, pens and a USB stick everywhere.

Image: The Wall, by _spoon_, via Flickr

I think I’ve hit a bit of a wall with Twitter.  The excitement of all the initial exploration and discovery has been overtaken by some feelings of hmmm, how can I put it?  Weary drudgery. Overload.  Disconnection.

I do recognise this flat phase from other networking – eventually after a bit of wild expansion, you need to regroup and consolidate.  I got really excited at uncovering new people and new blogs via Twitter;  then I went a bit mad adding new people and finally, I got to the stage of being unable to keep up, or remember who this person was.

On the whole, I’m loving Twitter, but it’s such an odd window on the world.

Four things that struck me this week:

• the excitement and the frustration of online networking

Sometimes you hit a good 140 character ‘conversation’ and you think: dang, this chat would be far better carried out over coffee, or a drink, or even something extremely 2003 like Instant Messenger.   The Twitter chat can be great, at times, but it’s also so frustrating and narrow.  You people on the internet, you’re different in real life.  I know that.  I’d like to see that. I’d like to see YOU.

• the niche nature of online networks

Few social networks, even the high profile ones, truly capture an audience.   There are so many relevant and interesting people who aren’t there.

In the case of Twitter, perhaps it’s maybe likely that everyone in an intense geekspace is present; but outside of that group, online networks are a partial representation of the whole.    Of course, that doesn’t matter:  we talk to the people who are here; but when we generalise beyond ourselves, we need to remember all the other folk who are too busy or too uninterested to get involved.

• the sheer VOLUME of virtual landfill (blogfill?)

I think it was the NME (someone will correct me) who coined the term ‘indie landfill’  for a certain kind of indie act that would get 6 months of fame if they were lucky.    With Twitter, I click blindly on posts.  Some blogs are lovely, some are dire, some are OK.

THERE ARE SO VERY MANY.

Freshnetworks have a well-written, interesting, pithy post up every single bloody day.   I’m still musing on Tuesday and they’ve bounced on to Thursday.

I can’t keep up.

Finally:

• We  are weirder than we realise

So. I tweet, I read, I blog, I comment.   When I come across an interesting blog that I’d like to read regularly, I add it to my Netvibes page (my RSS reader).   In the research I did last year amongst young managers, something like 9 per cent had used an RSS feed.    Now, I know fine well that I am not up there with the technogeeks.  Still, I have a Netvibes page.  THIS ACTUALLY MAKES ME QUITE UNUSUAL.  Add in my demographic details and it makes me an actual freak, but we won’t go there.

There’s a moral here somewhere.   Get out more, maybe (note to self).  This is nice, but it’s not the world; and for the most part, it’s not your customers’ world either.

How do you stop yourselves from being overwhelmed?

The community staircase

This is a model of research community socialisation that I developed in a white paper for Virtual Surveys a couple of years ago.   I was inspired by two sources: first, the ‘forming, storming, norming, performing’ model of focus group dynamics that all qualitative researchers have drilled into them; and a similar five-step model developed by Gilly Salmon to account for online socialisation in online learning environments.

Most of the chat about community moderation skills focuses on the higher level issues of discussion and debate.   What I wanted to stress in this model was the importance of the two bottom steps, access (getting in) and social presence  (establishing your voice).

Access is probably the most-neglected element of all.  We might invite people.  We might screen them to find certain characteristics.  Whatever we do, participants do not arrive at an online discussion relaxed, chipper and ready to go.   Like the focus group attendee who’s late for a group, they’ve just been on a journey.  It probably involved an invitation and a link; then it may have involved some registration and some screening; then it may have required that they set up a profile.

If we are lucky, then the journey to community entry will have been smooth and enjoyable, like arriving on a clean train at a nice, well organised conference.  If we are unlucky, the whole experience will have been the satanic lovechild of Facebook, MySpace, and the worst online survey you’ve ever taken; and you arrive, bedraggled, twitchy and suspicious, in the online community space.

So, my first memo to community developers: please please put the same amount of effort in designing the entry journey (invitation and screening) as you do into the rest of the community. It will pay off in happy, soothed participants who are reasonably confident that they know who you are and what they’re doing.

Memo number 2 to developers is to think about your conversation feedback loops.   Assuming that your participants won’t be camped on the site 24/7, how are you going to tell them about new content, and how are they going to find out about answers to their own comments?   Emailed comment notification is usually a good idea; if you don’t use this, you need ways of being very sure that participants will visit and revisit regularly.

The last part of access is welcome.   Once you’ve made it in, it’s nice to get a friendly message with a bit of orientation thrown in, maybe a first task.  It makes you feel wanted and valued.

NB Apparently minor things in this journey can be quite important.   If you give no clues at all about the choice of a screen name (and there is another conversation to be had about that in the first place), do not come crying to me later about Bigbottom29’s sense of being bullied.  Think about your audience and their likely online experience.  The under 20s may crop and upload user images at the drop of a hat;  the inexperienced participant in your over-50s life insurance community may panic and flail. Give them some pre-prepared options they can choose from.

The second stage in community development is establishing social presence. For me, a true sense of social presence iss essential for proper discussion to take place.  This rather fluffy phrase means that participants can easily get a sense of what the community itself is like, what other participants are like, and equally are able to communicate themselves reasonably fully within the online setting.

In a community of passion – let’s say a Dr Who community – this will be done at a personal level through username, avatar/signature and point of view.

In a research community, the initial site content that a new recruit finds will be extremely important in helping them develop an understanding of what the community is all about.    How do new recruits create their own presence?  Usernames, avatars and profiles can all be helpful,  but I firmly believe you need to structure the initial online discussions carefully so that you and your participants can get a full sense of each other right from the start.

A good, simple way of doing this is to have a nicely-designed  Introduce Yourself thread.   Model the introduction carefully (model model model I would say) and (1) you’ll get some lovely data right there  (2) the participants will feel a little bit loved and valued and (3) the participants will start to come to life.  (Is this just me?  There is often a golden moment in an online discussion where you truly begin to understand who the other person is.  It usually comes out of authentic exchange, and it’s really what I’m trying to spark in those initial conversations).

What do I mean by model?  Usually there is some important story or introductory background that your participants want to get off their chests.  Let’s say you’re an online retailer.  You’re mostly interested in response to a new design concept; you’re tempted to rush on to that and make early introductions minimal.   If you leave intros entirely up to participants (perhaps in the interests of saving pixels) they will default to name, age, job that’s all 4 now luv u byeee!!!

You will have saved pixels and a bit of effort from the moderator, but your community will have a rather limited sense of itself;  having started out with brief comments and no strokes/feedback, they may never wind up to giving you more heartfelt or difficult comments on the design.   You didn’t appear to care about them, so why bother?   Good introductory experiences pay back tenfold, just as they do in a focus group.

A better self-introduction task would be to ask the participant to introduce themself and say a bit about the last item of clothing they bought, and their personal fashion philosophy.    If the moderator models this by talking about him/herself, or giving a full example, the participant immediately sees what you mean and has a go.    The participant has now contributed fully; add in a couple of replies from the moderator or another participant with similar tastes, and you are on the way to creating a community that will eventually talk without you. The trick is to pick something that is relevant to you and interesting for participants to do; and in the analysis you will probably come back to this thread more than any other.

Teaching my grandmother to suck eggs, I’m sure.

One final comment on the model: each step has participant views and moderator views.  The moderator just as much as the participant has to create a sense of genuine personality and social presence in the content that they write, the questions that they ask and the replies that they make.   Personally, I like moderators to be able to establish authentic contact, and that may mean disclosing more about themselves verbally than they would do in a face-to-face setting.

Still relevant? Do I need to tweak this now?  What else do you think needs to be in place during the first stages of community formation?