The Miner and The Thinker
At Mediatel’s excellent Future of Media Research seminar last Friday, a large part of the panel discussion centred on the epic battle between Data and Research.
The general consensus was that the increasing need for ‘insight’ and the rise of the launch-then-refine model is pushing data further ahead of research as far as priorities are concerned. Helped along in no small way by diminishing research budgets.
The other main point of consensus was that data and research differ mostly by how they’re used and that the practioners of each are very different from one another. But the future is a fusion of the two.
All quite difficult to disagree with. But…
I don’t think the fusion of data and research is some shimmering nirvana, barely recognisable in the distant future. I think it’s already here, albeit in constant beta. Social is where research and data collide.
In terms of social media research, I think it’s easier to see it in terms of research being the process by which you generate data and insight. It’s not research or data. It’s research then data and often it’s research then data then research then insight. Exactly when you need social data and when you need social insight is for another post. Or you could come to our talk at Social Brands on the 8th Feb.
Data and insight are the destinations. Research is the path you take to get there. These paths vary, obviously, depending on where you want to get to but if we see research as the means of generating the information we need to make better decisions; and if we see that better decisions are made from either data or insight, and often both, then we see that research must be inherent in both.
Research is the means by which you generate the data AND also the means by which you interrogate it in order to extract the insight.
So to conduct in-depth social media research requires a blend of both data and research skills. You need to be both analyst and researcher. Miner and thinker. As soon as you see the depth of insight you can generate from social content and you understand how to achieve that insight, you can see how that blend manifests.