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Gaining Insight From Social Media Data

From the category archives:

Qualitative Research

Processing Qualitative Research Data With Tinderbox

by Tom Webster on January 15, 2010

I wrote a while back that I often use a piece of software for the Mac called Tinderbox to churn through messy, unstructured focus group data and see the meaning and inherent structure in a soup of qualitative data. I was fortunate to be asked to present my method at a Tinderbox Weekend last November [...]

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Focus Groups and the Research-Starved Organization

by Tom Webster on November 3, 2009

It’s no secret that traditional media is in an existential crisis right now, and budgets in print, radio and TV are being slashed through the bone and straight into the marrow. One casualty of this (certainly with print and radio) is the research budget. As someone who does a lot of qualitative research, more and [...]

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The Death Of Focus Groups?

by Tom Webster on October 14, 2009

Today I watched a little of the coverage for The BIG Conference, a social media event held in my home state of Maine, by eavesdropping on all the folks posting highlights to Twitter. One of the things I caught was a speaker proclaiming that the “Focus Group was dead.” Since I didn’t actually attend the [...]

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Finding Credible Sources of Social Media Marketing Data

by Tom Webster on April 14, 2009

…is hard. The problem, as ever, is one of sample. 99% of the social media ‘data’ I have seen is either anecdotal, qualitative (and I take nothing away from good qualitative, so don’t get me wrong) or derived from some form of convenience or self-selected sampling. In some cases, the sampling methods are clear, so [...]

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“Blue Sky” Research and the Radio Industry

by Tom Webster on March 26, 2009

Last year I sat in a large ballroom at the Advertising Research Foundation conference in New York, listening to the CEO’s of the four largest market research companies in the world talk about data quality and the trends facing our industry over the next five years. I love this conference above all others, for two [...]

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