The meaning of silence in an online context

I’ve been pondering a few of the discussions I’ve seen on online versus offline research approaches:  Zebrabites’ thoughts on the need to understand users in person as well as hypertext;  Matt Rhodes of Freshnetworks’ recommendation that we understand people in natural online communities as well as specially-constructed research communities.   People share themselves and their opinions differently in different contexts.

We tend to treat an online conversation (on a message board, a blog reply, a social network) as an honest record, right there on the screen, of what Audience A thinks of Topic B.  Or, at least, we might elaborate, what Willing Contributors from Audience A think about Topic B.   As Katie and Matt suggest, it’s not quite that simple.

Why wouldn’t people say what they think, in an online network? Why might they keep quiet?  In my view, social pressures shape our conversations online just as much as they do in everyday life.  Indeed, some of those pressures to behave may be even stronger online.

The other day, I touched on discourse or conversation analysis, where you analyse a given conversation and you look at the way the participants frame their discussion.   You also look, as far as you can, at what’s missing.

What is the meaning of silence, online? (Or: have I gone mad in trying to express what I mean?)

Let me try and explain.  Online, we have talk (the posted conversation which we can analyse to our heart’s content) and we have silence (the large majority who read but don’t contribute).   The posted conversation may not be an accurate reflection of the whole, in the same way that conversations in a group discussion may not always be good representations of individual opinions.

What silences people who might otherwise contribute? Here are my top three.

The silencing power of strong opinions

If I read a blog with lots of passionate contributions, my decision to contribute will depend on my viewpoint and how I feel about throwing it into the conversation.   If I dislike loud online argument, and those who have already commented are arguing passionately with each other, I may choose not to contribute my dissenting comment.

Another example: a couple of years ago, I helped troubleshoot an online community that wasn’t working too well.  It was pretty unmoderated: new people joined but they rarely participated.  It turned out that the community was dominated by a small group of older, vociferous and rather right-wing users.   New users arrived, took one look at some of the ‘hanging’s-too-good-for-them’ rants, and ran away.    They didn’t feel welcome.

Perceived social disapproval

I may choose not to talk about something that actually excites me because I suspect that other people will be negative about it.   To take a minor example, I use the blog network, Livejournal, and I’ve recently become a convert to Twitter.  People on LJ are routinely scathing about Twitter.   When I first started using Twitter seriously, I didn’t mention it on LJ.   Eventually, I broke down and talked about it, and various of my LJ mates broke out and said ‘Ooh, yes, it’s great, I have one too and here it is! ‘

I would never have known if I hadn’t asked.

Online conversation persistence

In stable online networks, our conversations can be very, very easy to follow.   As a result it can be very hard to gossip: nothing is hidden.  In real life we can sit through a boring presentation and then have a whispered chat with our neighbour about how dull it was, before putting on a bright smile and congratulating the speaker as they breeze up to us and ask what we thought.

If we thought that the entire conversation with the neighbour would be retrievable later by the speaker, we might act rather differently. Online, a third party may be able to do exactly that.

The persistence of online conversations also leads us to be careful about expressing our opinion of someone who doesn’t appear to be present.   They might come along in 3 hours or 3 days (or 3 years), and get upset.

‘The lurkers are supporting me in email!’

They might be.

Silence is not necessarily agreement.  It can be curiosity, boredom, or dissent, at the very least.  All of us are lurkers (readers), as well as participants.  Sometimes, we watch the debate and we don’t join in publicly.

If a counter-opinion can’t be expressed openly for fear of social consequences, back channels can help participants let off steam.  Sites like PostSecret help some people express socially unacceptable views.   Private messaging options and quick polls (the kind where you can’t see what everyone else put) can make it safer to express yourself.

You can do all sorts of things to make a network a safe space in which to express opinions.   Ultimately, though, you might need to triangulate your findings by mixing methods: networks and one-to-one, online and in-person.    Lifting an online conversation straight from a ‘natural’ network  may lead you to some highly unreliable conclusions.

Thoughts? Have I managed to express myself on this one?

The business of making communities

On Tuesday I went to Freshnetworks’ session on online communities in retail. Incredibly interesting morning, with 3 different speakers talking about the use of social media from different perspectives:  Helen Trim from Freshnetworks giving her top tips on what to do (and what not to do) in terms of social media;  Joanne Jacobs on measuring return on investment; and James Hart from online fashion site ASOS, talking about the (internal) route to launching the ASOS Life community (apparently launch was this Wednesday so I hope he has recovered now).

For a long while, I used to feel that few people in businesses of any sort really understood what social media did and how it feels – from the inside – to participate.  It was so pleasant listening to these people talk knowledgeably about how to do this.  Helen Trim’s slides in particular nearly made me weep with gratitude.  Yes. This is exactly what it’s like.

Anyway, I chatted to a couple of the delegates who were tussling with the headache-making question of how exactly your brand has a ‘conversation’ with its users.   Can a luxury brand, for example, have any real use for the democratic, tell-it-like-it-is world of social media?  And can you use customer reviews when your CEO has a phobia about negative feedback?

Afterwards I also chatted to the cheerful guys who were making a video of the whole thing.  I may have been overenthusiastic. *facepalm*

Adding beauty to market research

I’ve been reading various posts about market research and social media, which tend to focus on the usual self-hating stuff about the market research industry’s vulnerability.  I agree, pretty much:  some of the space that research took up is now being eaten away by other specialisms (data mining,  search engine optimisation, and web analytics), while the rest of what’s rightfully ours is taken by DIY tools such as SurveyMonkey.  (Can QualMonkey be far behind?)

Personally, I would argue that MR agencies have neglected to develop certain 21st-century skills in-house.   Market researchers tend to focus on data collection and analysis technology like Confirmit or SPSS  (if you’re lucky).

Things market researchers don’t bother with:  design.  Graphic design, web design, information design, whatever.   Design is right down at the bottom of the pile.   You buy it in, or you manage without it.

Researchers writing presentations huff over the latest critique of death-by-Powerpoint and insert a couple more company-approved clipart images into the 80-page deck.    Somewhere, a designer is weeping.

So.  If it were up to me,  I would not only run shedloads of training on statistics and experimental design, but I’d include these:

• Essentials of graphic design
• Digital photography
• Photoshop
• Using stock image libraries
• Web design and an introduction to CSS

And if I were running a big research agency, I’d invest in some graphic designers and programmers to create some nifty and beautiful interfaces for running surveys and online communities.

Why shouldn’t people expect loveliness in a survey?

What skills would you like to see?

Paradigms in research; or, how your worldview shapes your methodology

In the introductory lectures for my master’s in organisational behaviour, we heard a great deal about paradigms. Indeed, we heard so much about paradigms that several of my classmates were quite keen to go back and get a refund on the course.

We – researchers, embryonic management consultants, careers counsellors and human resources managers – wished to get on with the simple business of learning all about human behaviour so that we could manipulate it for profit.  But first, we had to pass this module.

So.   Paradigms are, roughly speaking, coherent belief structures. Some people describe them as a lens through which to view the world.  A paradigm is a bundle of assumptions about the nature of reality, the status of human knowledge, and the kinds of methods that can be used to answer research questions.   The piece that follows is adapted from Guba and Lincoln’s seminal chapter in the massive tome, Handbook of Qualitative Research – a book which would be extremely useful in hand-to-hand combat.

Anyway. In social science, there are at least three competing paradigms: positivism, constructivism, and critical theory.

Do not panic.   You have been working with these all your life, without knowing it. Let’s take them one by one.

Positivism is where many of us live most of the time. The world is real, that chair is solid, my findings are statistically significant. Positivism is the world of science and testing hypotheses.

In the positivist world, researchers are objective and strive to minimise sources of bias wherever they can. Research is true, researchers exist apart from their data, and the best research (because you can use rigour) is quantitative.

Market research mostly exists in a rather positivist world.  Significance, return on investment, purchase decisions.  These are solid things.  When positivists do qualitative research, they worry about representativeness of findings, and how many people in Birmingham actually said they disliked the concept. (There is of course post-positivism, but I’ll skip over that lightly).

Constructivism. Constructivists wear corduroy trousers and like bright colours.   Constructivists argue that human beings construct their own social realities in relation to one another.  Reality is subjective and experiential : that thing over there that looks like a table is actually being used as a chair. My particular construction of reality might be shared with many other people, but other people could construct the same reality in quite different ways.

Political stances and religious beliefs are examples of large-scale competing explanations of similar realities. Knowledge is not absolute, and (the killer in terms of methodology) the researcher is no longer outside the system, but part of it.  Findings may be idiosyncratic, rather than generalisable; approaches are holistic.  The goal is of constructivist research is understanding and structuring, as opposed to prediction.

Qualitative research leans towards constructivism, as I think you would guess.  However, it also tends to be batted back towards positivism, because full-blown constructivism can be a little too relative for all concerned, especially as lots of market research is done in order to find out what large organisations can actually sell to lots of people.

I am a social constructivist in outlook, so I believe that qualitative researchers are inescapably subjective and research findings are co-created between the researcher and the respondents.   I also subscribe to social constructivism’s Achilles heel, the interpretation problem, AKA ‘Why should I believe your version of events over anyone else’s’, although fortunately social constructivism has a handy get-out-of-jail-free card for that one.*

Which brings us to critical theory.

An observant reader who hasn’t run away screaming might have noticed that positivism and constructivism have slightly different implicit values. Positivism doesn’t really mention values, but its value centre is really data and rigour. Constructivism, all fluffy and relative, is very concerned about the participant, and explaining the participant’s point of view.

In contract, critical theory is all about value, or more precisely, all about power and politics.  Critical theory is concerned with power relations and patterns of dominance.  You’ll also see it described as neo-Marxist theory and indeed a good way of getting into the spirit of critical theory is to analyse any given situation in the manner of Rick from the Young Ones.

Critical theory looks at the world through a political lens, in which certain groups – rich people, politicians, men, capitalism in general – exert power and influence over other groups. If you like, critical theory takes a historical perspective. The goal of critical theory is emancipation of the oppressed.

It was more or less at this point that my fellow Organisational Behaviour students got very, very angry indeed. This was rubbish, one person said. He wasn’t here to learn about stupid critical theory; he was here to learn all about how people worked so he could go back to his company and learn how to manage people better.

The lecturer smiled.

Someone else said: this is total gobbledygook and anyway, it’s all just useless theory – how on earth could anyone take it seriously; and more importantly, how could anyone make a living being a consultant who depended on critical theory??

The lecturer smiled a great shark-like smile.

I love Critical Theory.

Critical theory helps you look at assumptions, and at power relations. In organisational research, you can look at the ways in which management organises and represents certain kinds of meanings. You can look at career progression and the definition of high-flying careers. You can create new concepts, such as the role of emotional labour in customer service jobs. In science communication, you can look at the problematic issue of public engagement, and whether it is meaningful to assume it is value-free.

In market research, you can look at corporate attempts to structure the meaning of a brand, and consumer resistance to such meanings.  You can look at Twitter, or Facebook, or OpenID with your Critical Theorist hat on. Who profits from certain meanings? What actions does the system permit or forbidden? How do users react?

In terms of method, critical theorists use analysis (historical, situational, textual) and qualitative interviewing.   Qual interviews are quite interesting, although most critical theorists will come over all critical while writing it up, rather than when wielding a tape recorder.

Positivism wears a white coat, constructivism accepts a cup of tea, and critical theory is SUSPICIOUS.

I think there’s a kind of paradigmatic mash-up, too: large corporations act in their positivist way, expecting thanks from the masses, and instead of being complicit, the masses are suspicious. They distrust your motives. They rebel. At other times, they carry your message quite happily to the ends of the earth.

Personally, I move between these three paradigms. I spend most of my time being a constructivist with post-positivist leanings: understanding responses and creating persuasive accounts.  I will often flick into a critical perspective, at least in analysing a brief, because critical theory shakes everything up in ways that can be very helpful.  It is perhaps not cricket to use critical theory as a tool for maintaining power relationships, but, well, needs must.

Anyway, that’s it for now.

Questions? Thoughts? Reactions?

*No one has ever asked me, but I have the answer.

Market research opinion: a contradiction in terms?

About 4 years ago, I did a master’s degree in organisational psychology.  I started off with the intention of changing career quite radically; I ended up (in the manner of many career changers) by making a more gentle change, to focus on science, new technology and (where possible) applying all that newly-updated knowledge of psychological theory to real-life projects.

Last year, I mostly worked with non-research organisations: usability agencies, user experience consultants, management consultants and learned societies.  Different working practices, different worldviews, different assumptions.

One huge difference in assumptions is that the practitioner is expected to bring their own professional opinions and wider knowledge to the table.     It may just be my impoverished experience, but too often researchers expect to present the findings rather coldly and consider the job done.   That’s what many research users expect, too.  You decide what to do with the findings once the researchers have backed out of the room.

At the same time, the Market Research Society complains (as it has done for over 20 years if my experience is anything to go by) that researchers are not getting enough respect as providers of true insight.

It is a remarkable thing when researchers offer insight.  Possibly a rather rare thing, too.

I think researchers box themselves in without even knowing it.  It’s a craft job, apprentice-taught.   There’s a startling lack of basic knowledge.  Although professionalism is creeping in via training, you’ll still find plenty of quantitative researchers who can’t tell you what a correlation coefficient is, and plenty of qualitative researchers who think that social constructivism is some form of Russian architecture.

We’re mechanics then, mostly, not designers and theorists.  There isn’t much of a theory of mechanics, and the mechanics struggle to offer meaningful insight into automotive design.

If I think about my own qualitative research training, then I don’t think I received any significantly useful professional development since I sat at the feet of Roddy Glen (himself an ex-planner) as a wee junior.     Doing a qualitative project as my Master’s thesis offered the chance to get stuck into theory;  and theory, as it turns out, is one of the most practical things you can learn.   Understanding competing theories, and you understand your own landscape for the the first time.  You’re clear about what you do, and you can offer your own opinion with far more perspective.

It’s a bit of a stretch, but I also wonder whether that atheoretical, fear-of-taking-a-stance working practice is one reason why there are so few research bloggers.    Having a personal opinion simply isn’t done.

My bad experience? Or would you agree?

Understanding online cultures: Motrin moms and international online motherhood

As a Brit, I hadn’t come across the controversy about the Motrin Moms TV advertising, although I’ve seen it referenced in lots of social media blogs.

I’m confused at some of the coverage which seems to focus on the corporate response rather than the terrifying lack of imagination involved in creating the advertising itself.

i just did a little homework, looking at the advertising, the initial response and some of the follow-up and I have to hope that if I had been anywhere near Motrin and their advertisers, I would have pointed out that they were inadvertently creating all the conditions for a Perfect Storm:

1. Talk about baby slings irreverently

I can’t believe they went there.  The Continuum Concept – it’s not just a book, it is practically a religion.   You would not believe the number of fervent baby-sling makers out there.   They are young, they use organic cotton, they are online and they are, well, a bit militant.

2. Use hipster talk and graphics to try to address a young, net-literate audience

The advertisers might not have intended to target online types with a heavy Twitter habit, but the style certainly looks as though it’s trying to engage their ironic geek attention.

3. Fundamentally, be in the business of flogging painkillers to the masses

If there is one thing that committed baby-sling wearers hate more than disposable nappies and powdered formula, it is Big Pharma.     You spend your entire pregnancy attempting to be as organic as possible, eschewing all painkillers as potential toxins;  and you carry that mindset right through the early breastfeeding days.   Taking a painkiller for your backache?  Are you serious?!!!  You might as well drink neat gin and be done with it.

Anyway.  Selling drugs to desperately health-conscious internet-savvy corporate-suspicious slightly-militant new mothers =starting from a bad place.

I don’t know about the general attitude to painkillers in the US, I have no idea about Motrin’s brand image, and there are aspects of the culture that I no doubt miss, but…I’ve been an online mum.    Still am, obviously, but rather past the baby stage.    I can sketch out the online mum subcultures of the UK and USA in a giant geek map if required to do so.    I can’t think of a mum subculture where this approach would have resonated.

I’ve seen commenters say (in comments) that as there were only 1,000 complaints on Twitter and Twitter mums were not the target audience, the company shouldn’t have worried.  I think they’re dead wrong about that, in this case.

Here’s where it gets difficult: online firestorms do not always match genuine outrage in the community of relevance.  Sometimes it can be a very bad guide to popular response.  In this case, I think it’s simple:  the attempt to engage through advertising backfired badly.     It could have resonated, I suppose, with the baby-sling sceptics, but the tone was off, and in any case the core proposition (sort out your baby-sling backache by necking pills) clangs horribly any way you try to deconstruct it.

Social media helps critics and sceptics to argue back with big corporations, and to mobilise support from their networks.  As well as sales figures and bland market research presentations, you get the direct, irritated voice of the complainer.  That’s not something everyone is ready for.   How to distinguish genuine complaint from issue-annexing?   Know your audience, both on- and off-line.

ETA One  thing that does bother me:  place-of-response bias.  Did the Twitter complaints get executives’ attention precisely because it took place on Twitter (nicely searchable and beloved geek-den) rather than deep in the comments on the message boards of parenting sites?

Twitter; and women in technology, for Ada Lovelace Day

I started using Twitter properly a couple of days ago, prompted by some of my friends taking it on, and so far I’m enjoying it way more than I expected. It’s also thrown me into contact with various market researchers working in new media.    It is brilliant to uncover some kind of community in this area.   Research often seems so quiet and underground – some of the voices I’m coming across are anything but, and that’s encouraging.

Anyway.  Ada Lovelace Day was yesterday, the brainchild of Suw Charman, as a device for discussing and celebrating women in technology.  Even with the growth of social networking in the last few years, UK women in technology seem quiet compared with those in the USA or Australia.  Maybe it’s a conversational thing:  female US and Aussie bloggers, for example, seem much happier at adopting a conversational style.

My personal heroines:

danah boyd, social media specialist who researches youth tribes, identity and privacy.  danah’s ability to dissect a topic and deal honestly with the underlying issues is a constant inspiration.   While regulators tend towards moral panics, danah boyd points out sociability and strategising.   She does her research as both outsider and participant: most of all she starts by understanding what moves her audience, not taking third-party opinions as truth.

She has just joined Microsoft Research where I hope she will continue to bring her clarity and plain dealing to a corporate environment that would appear to need it.

My two other inspirations are legions rather than individuals,and I think that’s a good thing.   Female voices often seem absent from techy or argumentative online spaces (for example, comments in the Guardian), but there are very many women who are extremely active online – just not always where you’d expect.

• The founders of Mumsnet, who run a freewheeling and occasionally anarchic service used by mothers of babies and small children.   The design is clunky but it works beautifully, and the community are amusing and deeply supportive.

• The very many female tribes on Livejournal, whose energy in setting up fan communities devoted to film, celebrity (like, er, ohnotheydidnt), and cult TV is unparalleled.   LJ is still the secret handshake of social media:  I learned much of what I know about communities, flamewars and trolls through hanging out in its many halls.

The basic qualitative interviewing kit, part 1

The basic interviewing kit

I’m on the road this week, for the first time in a while.  Just packing up and sorting through my supplies.  My current interview kit is so tiny that I’ve had to invest in a bright stripy pouch from Paperchase in order to stand any change of finding it in the bottom of my bag. 

What do I have?

Olympus digital voice recorder.  These are about £60 at the moment, and this dinky little recorder connects to the computer via USB.  It takes a single AAA battery (essential spare also pictured).  The micrphone on this machine is quite excellent, producing really good sound quality for interviews and group discussions.   When empty there are about 12 hours of recording time available – good for long interviewing days.  Battery life is a bit skittish – it’s easy to leave on by accident – so spares are still important.

I still slightly mourn the demise of my Sony Professional Walkman, where at least you got a physical cassette to keep at the end of every interview, but these are great.

Sony mini noise-cancelling headphones, around £99.  I love these.  They’re comfortable, they’re pretty, and they do exactly what it says on the tine.  Noise-cancelling headphones make it possible to listen back to voice recordings even when you’re in a noisy environment, like a train.  They are also perfect for listening to music and watching DVDs on your laptop.  White means they’re quite hard to lose, too. 

All this fits in one little pouch – tuck in a spare pack of batteries and even a couple of pens, and you’re good to go.

Are we allowed to talk about downloading?

A few months ago I ran some groups with the usual warm-up of discussing mobile and internet use.  The one difference between this and normal practice was that for this project, we rang up the attendees a few days before the groups and had a short conversation with them.

The intention was merely to check that the attendees were using the specific services we were researching, but it had some interesting effects in the subsequent sessions.

In the focus group, we started off with a nice conversation about Internet habits.   I gradually began to notice that people I’d interviewed earlier weren’t sharing parts of their internet use.    That woman wasn’t talking about her Ebay addiction.  That young man wasn’t talking about his use of dating sites.  As we got on to talking about music and film, one man leaned forward, threw a quick glance at the client who was sitting in, and said, ‘Are we allowed to talk about downloading?’

It was an interesting one.   The observers, I think, thought he was referring to iTunes or the BBC iplayer or Channel 4 on demand.   From the conversation we’d already had on the phone, I knew he was talking about torrenting and Limewire.   Our focus in the research was rather different, so we had a brief  and somewhat coded chat about music downloading and then moved on.

Talking about internet habits in a focus group poses some interesting challenges.  Most people use the internet – YouTube apart – when they’re by themselves.  Ask about internet habits these days and you may be prying into some very private territory indeed.   And that’s well before we get onto s*x.

What are the reasons for not sharing habits in a group?

Websurfing is solitary and private Sharing one’s favourite sites may be like sharing favourite books or TV programmes.   The amount of time spent checking celebrity gossip sites may not be something that the respondent wants to share.

Respondents fear being judged for their interests Both the Ebayer and the internet dater didn’t want to talk about these specifics.     Things might have been very different if the group were composed of like-minded people, but it wasn’t.   These people stayed quiet.  They joined in the discussion of Facebook, because Facebook was something that everyone could share, but they didn’t want to discuss some of the sites that actually meant a great deal to them.   The internet dater was a big user of gay dating sites like Gaydar: talking about that site to a mostly straight group would be a step too far.

Some habits are grey in terms of their legality An in-depth discussion of someone’s torrenting habits may be possible one-to-one, but in a viewing studio with cameras, microphone and three people behind a mirror taking notes, it’s easy to decide not to mention it.

Researchers aren’t aware of what’s out there The researcher who has only ever used Facebook or perhaps read the occasional technology blog does not have a good feel for the myriad of ways in which people connect online.    While some researcher naivety can be helpful, lack of awareness can mean that certain questions never get asked.

Clients may be even less aware (and in any case, are tightly focused on their own organisation’s interests) The typical research client is heavily overworked and either has little time for personal exploration of say, social media, or is in the wrong demographic for it to be second nature.    There are some very web-savvy exceptions, of course.

Research (especially market research) is heavily normative Market research tends to be commissioned by rich white business people who want to sell things to a relatively quiescent audience.   People working in large companies would probably agree that internet privacy is really only a concern for people who have something to hide.

I would argue that the effect of all these forces is to downplay the discussion of messy or problematic habits, especially in group discussions.   The problem then is that the research user ends up with, at times, a heavily edited and skewed version of reality, which may leave out some important yet uncomfortable truths.

The practical implications of the shadow web is that researchers should be aware of group pressures when talking about internet habits, and should, where possible, be digital natives themselves.

Researchers also need to use mixed methods.  Telephone interviews and web-enabled interviews can be far more revealing than a one-and-a-half hour focus group, for some subjects.  Message boards may encourage quiet people to speak their minds.

Researcher openness also helps.  Although it may go against the grain, it can be very helpful to share some of one’s own messy habits.    It sets the right kind of non-judgemental atmosphere.  Once the group knows about your addiction to websites about Jennifer Aniston, they may relax and become more open.

The research client may secretly pity you, but that’s how it goes.

Snow Queen

I love snow. It has been wet and slushy today, but very early on Monday, with snow falling softly under sodium streetlights, it was quite magical.

Once a decade we get enough snow to build a proper snowman. Some of our neighbours went all out – if you look closely, you’ll see that this lady had snowbosoms.

I’m trying to think of some spurious link to the economy/market research/the world of business; but actually I think the only moral is that sometimes the exact right thing to do is to build a great big snowman. And then have a snowball fight.