A new chapter

Over the last two or three years my interest areas have broadened out significantly - taking in advertising, psychology, economics, social media, game theory, and a whole lot more. This has been a personal journey taking in both personal and professional interests, and specifically working towards a crucial point in my life.

It has been a long journey, but I have arrived at both my destination and my starting point: I am finally about to embark on a career in market research. I am quite unbelievably excited.

For the last couple of years I've been working in a social media role for a startup providing a database and monitoring service. It has been challenging, ever-changing, and rewarding; it's also seen me spending most days thigh-deep in social media, and seeing all the new developments in that environment. During my time there I've been keeping very close tabs on the different ways that market research has been embracing social media, with all the opportunities and challenges that this provides. This has given me a dream opportunity: this morning I started at Ipsos Mori where I'll be working in a new social media listening team there (to which I should probably add that from this post onwards, opinions are purely my own and don't reflect the policy or opinion of Ipsos Mori). I'll hopefully be able to bring some new ideas to the table myself, but for me the main thing is finally putting myself in a market research framework and Ipsos will be the perfect place for that. I'm looking forward to hurling myself into as many different research situations as possible, and picking up the hard traditional research skills to bring myself up to speed, to complement my social media background.

As I say, this is both the end and the beginning. The end because I've now definitely arrived in the place I want to be - at the cutting edge of market research - and hope to be at Ipsos for many years to come; the beginning because of exactly that. It's taken a while for me to get here - one or two questionable decisions and ropey interviews on my part along the way - but I'm absolutely convinced that I've landed in the best possible place and this is a tremendous opportunity well worth waiting for. What will the future hold? In a perfect world, a whole host of different experiences and challenges and hopefully I'll be able to start answering some of my own questions about why we do things, our own foibles and idiosyncrasies and behavioural traits. That's what got me interested in research in the first place after all.

With regard to the social media listening side of things which I'm specifically going to be working on, I'm looking forward to getting stuck in with some of these issues:

How can we ensure that a social media sample is representative of (1) the social media population and (2) the wider population in general?
How can we get around the lack of good demographic and personal information on social media to construct good samples? Can we gauge information of that sort even if it hasn't been explicitly specified?
How do standard measures of central tendency, dispersion and confidence level hold up with social media data, relative to other data collection methods?
Does influence matter within social media, and if so, in what contexts, and how can it be evaluated?
How do we reconcile the openness and availability of open-source social media data with traditional research ethics and values?
How far can text analytics go? Are the margins of error acceptable?
What are the limitations of social media listening research? What sorts of questions can't we answer? How can the boundaries be pushed?
When social listening isn't able to answer your very specific, niche question, is it still of any benefit? What if people aren't talking about the issues or brands that interest you? What are the best ways around this?

I repeat: I am quite unbelievably excited.

Good things come to those who wait.