We talk to qualitative market researchers within agencies and in-house research departments almost every day. So having banged the drum of online qual research for several years now, it finally feels as though the message that social media and market research are good bed fellows is finally getting through!

Understandably, qual researchers don't want their well-honed analysis skills removed or undervalued, but they are now accepting of the fact that the process of engagement, observation and data capture can benefit hugely from the use of smart social software and social networking. Blogs, bulletin boards and communities - all forms of social software - are fast becoming the tools of choice for agencies looking to engage consumers in deeper, more candid discussion, and with greater efficiency (time and cost!). Where before these platforms were simply seen as a means to push messages, they are now accepted tools to allow the researcher to get closer to the consumer (in their environment on a very regular basis)  than ever before.

But harnessing social software, social media and online networking behaviours requires new skills as well as tools. New listening skills, the ability to design engaging online tasks and activities, and, most importantly, knowing how to 'talk' to people online is a big challenge for those agencies stuck in the past. For this reason along, dub has created a compelling range of products and supporting online research services to help brands and agencies negotiate the pitfalls and overcome the hurdles to create more engaging, creative research.

These new research skills and techniques should be adopted by all newcomers, fast, as the world of insight communities - or MROCs - and research blogging is fast becoming the norm for immerse and longitudinal studies.

To find out more about how your agency and day-to-day work can benefit from dub's research online tools and services, contact Stephen Cribbett at stephen@dubstudios.com

Background
The Lexi Cinema is one of the most innovative and state-of-the-art micro-cinemas in the UK. As well as being one of London’s newest arthouse cinemas, it’s also a Social Enterprise, raising funds for the The Sustainability Institute's activities in South Africa.

Objectives
Not only were the Lexi’s management team in the dark about social media, they were unclear as to what it could deliver for their organisation. Having approached them with an open mind (and open ears), we quickly came to the conclusion that they needed help demystifying the world of online social media. In turn, it was identified that some basic social media campaign work that could increase occupancy and help spread the good word of the team’s efforts, their fantastic venue and the awe-inspiring program of films and events.

Solution
Our starting point was a series of managed workshops and engagement sessions with the management team. Stakeholders were presented the opportunity to ask those awkward questions they always wanted to know about Social Media, but were too afraid to ask. Detailed show’n’tell sessions ensued, allowing the team to get hands-on with social media services, thus removing all fear of failure!

With the basics out the way and the team knowing the difference between a tweet, a troll and a tag, we set about developing and implementing a social media strategy. The focus was to engage two key audiences; local cinema-goers and content producers. With very tight budgets and minimal resources available, the solution needed to adopt free and open social networking platforms. We set about building a Lexi community of cinema-goers on Facebook, and focusing more on niche producer networks using Twitter and it's in-built monitoring tools. Hashtags proved invaluable when igniting conversations around specific films and cultural events such as the live stream from The Met in New York.

Local audience groups were invited to join The Lexi's Facebook page, where they received regular film updates and could swap their views and opinions. We trained the client in the fine art of Community Management and sat back and watched the conversations flow. For The Lexi, the ability to get direct feedback from the horse's mouth proved invaluable!

Twitter was then used to engage with content producers, and other cultural thought-leaders in order to spread the wider word.

Results
With an online community of over 1000 connected people, our Social Media Strategy has almost doubled The Lexi's subscriber base in little over 6 months. More importantly, bums-on-seats have increased and brand awareness is at a high thanks to the multitude of online conversations taking place daily. Those that joined the community are more likely to visit the cinema on more than one occasion, and traffic to the website has seen a significant increase - along with online ticket sales.

But don't take it from me, here's what the client says;

I wish we had a working relationship with all our suppliers and service providers, like the relationship we have with Dub. They just get it!

Results: significant increase in bums on seats in our cinema (!), significantly increased traffic to our website, the establishment and maintenance of two flourishing and engaged communities through Facebook and Twitter, people mentioning our Facebook and Twitter communities at the bar in the cinema, significantly improved search ranking and an in-depth but clear and simple consultation document on the best way forward for our business, online and in the area of social media. We are very lucky.

From the outset, Stephen and the team at Dub understood the challenges facing a local social enterprise micro-cinema with a less-than-ideal physical location and a minuscule marketing budget.  Energy, enthusiasm, the ability to really listen, the intelligence to quickly appreciate strategic and operational context, and, of course, the patience to explain the finer points of social media marketing to the, er, shall we say…less technologically aware – Dub have these qualities in abundance, not to mention the more prosaic qualities of responding quickly to queries and delivering things when they say they will.  If our plans for cinema world domination come to fruition, I’m sure it will be in no small part down to Stephen and the team at Dub.

And finally, The Lexi Cinema has a blueprint with which to extend their estate in the future, so watch this space...

On Monday this week I visited the Social Media World Forum at London Olympia. It's in it's second year (I think) and growing, and hosts a series of conferences, workshops and a walk-around exhibition. This year the event was seemingly split in two; one half of the camp representing Social Media practitioners, including PR and SM agencies and SM monitoring specialists the likes of Yomego, Huzu (hi Graeme!) and the ever-provocative Nixon McInnes, the other half more focused on Enterprise2.0, including platform providers, cloud computing businesses and other specialists software service providers including Telligent, Huddle and Siteforum.

I went along with an open mind, not sure of the quality that would be on show, or the extent of the show. While it was only relatively small - some 4,000 visitors over two days - there was a healthy buzz, particularly around the Enterprise2.0 entity. So while PR, Internal Comms and Marketing people surveyed the Social Media room, more as a catch-up than a get ahead, the Enterprise2.0 room was demonstrating that business was finally getting its head around how to harness social tools for things like productivity, collaboration, KM and the like - the constituent elements in what we at dub label Social Business Design.

The reason we set about creating dub, and what is clearly lacking based upon my observations from the Social Media World Forum, is to offer clients impartial advice and support in helping their organisation not only identify which platforms - bespoke or off-the-shelf - they should consider as part of the solution, but also to help generate user buy-in, or as one organisation put it, carry out user diagnostics.

There are more and more useful and successful on-demand products and services available, yet few organisations fully understand how to get user adoption, and how best to tackle things like internal policy and compliance. Sadly, the stories that came out of the event demonstrated that these things are the biggest challenges, and the things that often require the greatest resource and budget in order to achieve any semblance of success.

So while dub can and does create bespoke social tools, we also work with clients to understand if there are social solutions readily available that can do the job, and then, more importantly, work with the 'people' so that they can identify what's in it for them, and how they can use it to help them with their daily grind.

(My next post will contain the excellent presentation given by co-founder of Huddle, Andrew McLoughlin. There's also an alternative view/review of the show through the eyes of my colleague Dan Miles here)

Engadget, one of the leading gadget blogs on the internet, recently decided to turn off commenting on articles. Their claim is that in in recent days commenting has got 'out of hand', with a few people creating an environment that they feel is 'ugly, pointless and threatening'.

It's a bold move, and one I suspect they did not take lightly. By their own admission, and inline with the oft cited 1% rule, only a small percentage of their readership comment. However, the feature is considered one of the basic tenants of social media - allowing motivated readers to become part of the debate. Indeed, it's features like commenting, along with the low barriers to entry, ability to syndicate across multiple platforms/channels, etc. that have helped the format grow to the size, variety and popularity it has today.

Benefits aside monitoring comments, filtering out the spam and ensuring abuse is kept at bay can be a difficult process. Blog authors have options, which include:

• Moderation - before a comment is displayed online, it must be 'cleared' by a site administer, ensuring no detrimental posts get through. However, this can take away the immediate gratification users have come to expect and cause commentors to feel they're being censored. Such a process also becomes unfeasible for a site that is as popular (and has such a high number of generated comments) as Engadget.
• Spam filters - Great for some removing the 'v1Agra' type of spam message we have all come to despise, but limited when it comes to deciding if a well composed comment is inappropriate
• Community-managed voting - only displays comments that have been given a positive vote by readers. Very 'hands-off' for site owners, but requires an extra level of interaction from users
• Register to vote - Great for blogs with a small following - e.g. personal holiday blogs, but becomes difficult to track with large and manage with large user base. Equally, as user names and passwords are required each time, barriers to entry for commenting (especially for casual commentors) become very high
• Threading - this allows people to comment on comments. It doesn't stop spam comments, but it does conversations to diverge. Sites like Slashdot take this approach to the extreme, allowing unlimited 'threading'. The side effect is that this can quickly become confusing to the casual observer. Limited threading is a useful

Our advise at Dub is to try and take maximum advantage of the medium and be as open to viewer comments as possible. As you can see, there are a myriad approaches to helping mange comments. Unfortunately, for some publishers all the options in the world can't stop the trolls and spammers of this world.

Read Engadget's full statement here

We've said for a long time that online research communities provide better research experiences for both clients AND respondents, or members as we prefer to label them. Fun and enjoyment can be quite hard to measure, but seeing the feedback we've just received from a community that we've been running in Brazil, I think it speaks for itself. It's so good we had to share it with you.....

"I would like to thank you for the opportunity to be part of the project, I hope you enjoyed my ideas....I loved it and wanted you to know I did it with affection. I found it really cool, I hope you have received lots of good ideas."

and then there's this one..

"Thank you! I really liked taking part, I found it to be very dynamic and different."

and this one..

"I am available when if you need more research, okay? You can count on me."

I think you get the idea. These people thrived on the  creativity and fun that the tasks we designed offered them, and of course the very personal relationships they struck up with our moderators. I your research needs an injection like this, we'd love to hear from you.

Creating a universal set of metrics that can be used to gauge the success and returns achieved by using social media has long been a hot topic of debate, so to join in the debate we decided to visit Measurementcamp yesterday.

The event took place at Dare and was fronted by a very affable chap by the name of Will McInnes. The purpose of the collaborative initiative is to create open resources, be they guidelines, frameworks, metrics etc, which allow us all to measure the impact of social media online and offline. As Will put it, the initiative is un-owned and relies on feedback, hence this post.

The 2 hour event kicked off with some introductions among the nearest group of people - within which we had Beth Granter who later gave a presentation on work she had been doing at her agency The Good Agency, Claire the PR lady who has been working with Metia, and one other lady whose name escapes me but who I recall came from a job/recruitment site.

Next up were two presentations, one from Beth (mentioned above), the other from Robin Wilson, one of Measurementcamp's co-founders.

Beth walked us through her work with an animal charity (sorry, didn't scribble down the name!) and how specifically she used social media to a) Drive traffic to their website, b) Increase awareness of the charity and its campaigns, and c) Increase charitable donations.

Much of Beth's efforts were concentrated on Flickr, Facebook and Twitter, with the likes of QDOS, Samepoint, FlickrStats and Google Analytics used to create reports and metrics that could be fed back to the client to validate the project.

The second presentation from Robin (of McCann) focused on his work with Durex, and in particular one of their newer female orgasm heightening products. The campaign was aimed at a) Increasing sales, b) De-stigmatising the category and c) Making Durex less clinical and more fun. The campaign was aptly titled 'Things that make you go oh'. Like it Robin!

Robin used three main constructs to report back to his client, namely Conversation Triggers, Conversations Created and People Engaged. Most interesting however was how he used 'reach' statistics to allow a direct comparison with his work and that taking place in other channels such as advertising and DM. The conclusion of this was that social media was twice as effective, though how much post-rationalisation that went on here is anyone's guess!

The big take-outs that I came away with from the session were:

1. There are lots of ways of measuring social media, though practitioners don't trust them all yet
2. Facebook still provides the most powerful vehicle to engage in conversation and build brand and campaign awareness
3. There is a need to create bespoke social media dashboards since each social media platform has its own and it can take a lot of time gathering the data up and wrapping it for onward presentation to clients
4. Their is often a delay from 'input' to 'response' that needs to be carefully considered when seeding content
5. Tracking sentiment is, and is always likely to be, very difficult due to its subjectivity. Get over it and move on!
6. This is an extremely young practice, and the many ways in which people are approaching it, from agencies to individuals, further supports this fact.

All in all it was a great event and I praise the co-founders' attempts to iron out some of the differences and negativity around social media. It is a powerful medium that should be considered as part of the mix, but objective planning is oh so important to truly understand whether or not social media can offer a solution. As both speakers bravely confirmed, their campaigns did not meet all their objectives, but certainly hit most of them. With shared learnings comes a stronger, more forthright approach. Onwards and upwards Measurementcamp!