InSites Blog

As an InSites employee & new joiner of the InSites Health team, I was very curious to see our Health knowledge & experience summarized in the InSites Health Smartees.

‘Never skip breakfast’ is one of the basic health commandments, so we started the workshop with a sumptuous breakfast! The other guests and I were fully ready for the start of a highly efficient workshop!

• The patient can no longer be ignored – 43% of patients look for online health info every month

There’s a lot of movement in the world of Health. Some evolutions are less impactful from a market research perspective, but others are ‘incontournables’. One of them is the way in which patients are stepping forward and are engaging a lot more in conversations about their health (offline & online), which is a true revolution in the Health sector and is deeply changing the relations between the HCP, the patient & the pharmaceutical company.
The first way to anticipate this new situation is to monitor and to know ‘your tools’ as a Health Conversation Manager. My colleague Magali Geens, InSites Consulting Health Director, gave us a view on the 2010 Health Study: Social Media Use in Health. The audience, renowned people in (European) health care marketing, was especially excited about the results because this year the data were extended from Europe to the rest of the world.

• Do not fear – but learn from patient conversations & act!

Health marketers learned how they should engage in the conversation with the empowered patient: track search behavior on Google, find out whether competitors already use ‘sponsored links’ (e.g. no pharma company has yet bought a ‘link’ for the Dutch term ‘hoofdpijn’ (‘headache’ in English)), read conversations about treatments, side effects etc. between patients on communities, social networks…
I think the most important thing I learned was that pharma companies do not need to be afraid of online patient conversations – on the contrary, it is an opportunity for them to learn from these conversations and think of ways to optimize the HCP-patient-pharmacy relation within the given context.
Some more arguments: conversations are more often positive than negative; patients are very open to be activated online by the HCP & the broader industry (e.g. 48% is interested in a doctor who can be consulted online!)

• The answer is out there… Tapping into the conversations of connected patients and caregivers

After a refreshing break, Prof. Dr. Niels Schillewaert taught us how to answer health-related questions without asking questions to patients… You could literally ‘sense’ the enthusiasm of the audience upon encountering the added value of social media nethnography on the basis of two cases in Health Research. The presentation clearly inspired people as there were a lot of questions about how to do it in practice and for which business goals it is relevant (e.g. brand analysis, online marketing, evaluating ad impacts…)
One slide of the presentation highly enlightened me: the summary of the advantages of social media nethnography. In short: there is a reduced interview bias (no single question is asked to patients), really new insights (new questions pop up based on answers found), the answers are surrounded by a ‘rich’ context (patient language, spontaneous answers in the ‘heat of the moment’), emotions are measured and you can go back in time…

• How to forecast prescription behavior of HCPs

Within the continuously innovating market research industry, we may not forget that as a research agency, we still massively conduct ‘traditional’ online quantitative research.
Sarah Mertens from AstraZeneca presented us the research design and learnings of a pan-European Physician study. The goal was to quantify current prescription behavior and future switch intention among specialists of a product x and to understand drivers & barriers to switch from current treatments to product a.
I learned here that close cooperation between the client & the research agency was very important for the success of the study. In order to have a 100% solid & valid design, some smart elements were built-in (e.g. reliability of measurement was double checked: self-reported prescription behavior was almost an exact match of the up-to-date available prescription data).

At the reception afterwards, all attendees were fully engaged in conversations about patient conversations and I … I was really proud to be part of the Health Team of InSites Consulting!

Interested in the presentations?

Social Media Nethnography, a set of groundbreaking research techniques for discovering and applying insights from social media, has received recognition and praise from IBM with the award of this year’s IBM SPSS Insight Award. But the results of InSites Consulting’s application of nethnography have attracted attention and praise across the entire marketing and research industry.

• The Dutch association MWG awarded the Hans du Chatinier-Prize at the AMMA Awards 2010.
• UK digital think tank eConsultancy gave the idea its Innovation Award in 2009.
• MOA (Dutch Market Research Association) recognized the innovation of the technique by awarding it the 2009 Feedback Innovation Award.
• And by applying the analysis of user-generated content in social media to improve life for the elderly, InSites Consulting’s Senior R&D Manager Annelies Verhaeghe won ESOMAR’s 2009 Young Researcher of the Year Award.

These prizes follow several other awards for InSites Consulting (ESOMAR, AMA, ARF and MOA).

Social Media Nethnography combines InSites Consulting’s method, software and techniques with IBM’s predictive analytics to gather and analyse unstructured conversations and feedback from social media. Such insights can be fed back into product development, services and entertainment, and the results of changes can easily be measured.

Why study content of online conversations?

According to Annelies Verhaeghe, Senior R&D Manager, there are several reasons why market research should study the content of online conversations.

‘First of all in contrast to traditional market research where individual answers are not public, comments on social media can be read by everyone. Whether companies like it or not, social media are nowadays a full element of communication and advertising that influence people in their buying decision process. Secondly, at a time where response rates in traditional research are declining, these spontaneous answers are a welcome source of information.
And finally online buzz contains new, high quality information which is not easily available via traditional research. It creates the ability to go back in time, gives a glimpse of the moment of truth and makes it possible to discover blind spots which could lead to new market insights.’

Over the last two days, I attended the SPSS Directions Conference in Rome (IT). As a speaker, I was invited to bring a case study on using text analytics on social media data and eager to learn what others were doing on this domain. Moreover, since SPSS was recently acquired by IBM, I was curious to see what the future would bring. So I headed to Rome…

SPSS is typically associated with number crunching. One theme that however kept on coming back was the importance of qualitative and contextual data. I was truly amazed by the number of speakers on text analytics. With about 80-90% of company data that are unstructured, it is no surprise that this analysis technology is taking up. Especially in the area of customer satisfaction research, more and more people are using open questions in surveys to explain the “why” behind the numbers. The usage of text in predictive analytics is augmenting and so far, text seems to add quite a lot in the predictive power of models.

Many presentations also stressed the importance of the context in data collection. People are less rational than we often assume. In order to predict behavior, we have therefore to make more use of data collected at the heat of the moment. Particularly interesting was the speech of Ravi Dhar, Director of Yale center for customer insights. With some vivid examples, he stressed the importance of integrating context variables in your survey. For example, in a study with P&G (the measurement of the most effective communication for washing powder). The results revealed that on TV, it is better to the cleanness of your laundry whereas on the shopping floor ‘colors’ were a more decisive element.

A final session that drew my attention was organized by Mark Jeffries on soft skills. Many statisticians prefer to stick to the safe environment of their computer. However, we also need to sell projects and present the results of studies in an impactful way. Here are some tips & tricks to make this process more smooth:

• Whenever you get a business card, do not immediately put it away. It is the story of the person in front of you. Instead make a remark about it. Everybody likes to hear about oneself.
• If you want to get a ‘yes’, start already nodding with your head when you are asking the favor. There is a big chance that the other person will mirror your behavior and you will get what you want.
• In networking events, have a look at the feet of the person you are talking to. If his feet point too much in the other direction than where you are standing, he probably finds the conversation boring.
• The power of three: make sure that you always mention 3 reasons if you want to make a point. People have a tendency to believe you more.

It was the first time that I attended the SPSS conference and I must say that I was pleasantly surprised by its content. It seems that quantitative analysis is embracing qualitative data. At InSites Consulting, we believe in the fusion of methods and I can only consider it as a positive signal that companies like SPSS and IBM place this so high on the agenda.

However the industry needs to take even more steps. I wonder why there were no presentations where text analytics was applied on data from qualitative research. It seems that concepts like research communities, online discussion groups, blog research have not yet penetrated in this audience. Secondly, I appeared to be the only speaker who really showed how to embrace text analytics for nethnography. People were enthusiastic about the topic and I received the IBM- SPSS Insight Award 2010 for my submission. I hope this might inspire other researchers for next year’s conference! More information on the award will follow soon.

Consumers are increasingly conscious of the information they place on social networking sites. 81% indicate that they think twice before posting something, while 79% have become more selective in choosing and accepting ‘friends’. 74% give thought to which pictures they place online and which ones they do not.

In spite of the more cautious attitude, 87% indicate that their online identity strongly corresponds to their offline identity. 13% of consumers however admit to using a different persona online than who they are in reality. The study by InSites Consulting also shows that 23% of users feel they can more easily express their emotions via social media than in real life.

“Our study clearly shows that consumers are becoming more mature in their use of social media. Users can be themselves, though do so in a conscious manner. A form of online etiquette will increasingly be developed in an organic way by consumers themselves.” notes Steven Van Belleghem, Managing Partner.

These are conclusions of our Social Media Around the World Study among 2,800 internet users in 14 countries.

26% of social media users access these websites via their mobile phones. Asia and North America are frontrunners in this. Southern Europe is still somewhat behind to the rest of the world in this area. These are the results of a global study carried out by InSites Consulting in 14 countries among 2,800 respondents.

Mobile users are intensive users
Surfers who consult social media via their mobiles log in an average of three times per day. The average for people without mobile access is 1.5 times per day. Mobile users are also more active when it comes to sending messages, uploading photos and becoming fans of brands.

“As a result of mobile internet, consumers can immediately share their opinions with their network, which increases the spontaneity of these messages. Expectations for the growth of mobile internet are positive, which means the use of social media will increase even more over the coming years,” says Steven Van Belleghem, Managing Partner of InSites Consulting.

55% has no or limited access to social media at work

Over half of consumers have no, or limited access, to social media at work. Consumers in North & South America and Australia in particular face these limitations. Consumers in Eastern Europe and Asia have the fewest limitations.

“Companies who exclude their commercial people from social media are effectively cutting off their teams from consumers. Companies that do so are sending the message that they are not interested in having a relationship with consumers” says Steven Van Belleghem.

Together with Tim Duhamel, CEO of InSites Consulting, I’m responsible for our MC DC (“Marketers & Consumers, Digital & Connected”) report. The report deals with 17 challenges that digital media marketers are currently facing. The study is carried out in 16 European countries in a partnership with IAB Europe and is representative for the respective Internet populations, aged 15 and older.

Based upon the MC DC research, I would like to share some key insights.

First of all, it is clear that the consumer today is different than the consumer a few years ago. The rise of social media changed the way consumers interact with each other, but also what they expect from brands. Consumers want the interactions with brands and not only in terms of forwarding advertising campaigns (the viral aspect), but also having the ability to voice their opinion on a discussion board / social media fan page (to a lower extent) where the brand and other customers are present. Besides that, they want to be involved in the creation of new products / ads (mainly to give feedback). So there are many opportunities for brands nowadays to strengthen their brand-customer relationship.

Next to this, we see that more and more people are connected 24/7. The usage intensity of the Internet has increased throughout the years and the Internet has become a mass media channel (soon to overtake TV – if it not already happened in some younger target groups). The rise of the mobile Internet will only speed up that trend and I truly believe one day we will all be connected (be it with a smartphone, be it with laptop, be it with another device). The boundaries between personal and professional lives will fade (as is already the case with ourselves and modern marketers in general).

Finally, the rise of social media has redefined ‘privacy’ to a certain extent. If you would have asked people a few years back to share their experiences online about their dinner yesterday, a movie they had seen… they would have said “No Way”. Today, a part of the e-mail inbox has gone public, but people are very much aware of the consequences in terms of privacy. Today’s surfers have a self-protecting behaviour (using antivirus software, firewalls, being careful to publish something online…) which I think is nothing more than common sense because the Internet still has its dark “websides”. That’s the reason why cloud services are still not that popular today: most people have privacy concerns, have their doubts about security in putting their data online… all of which need to be addressed via communication and by illustrating the reliability of these services (RAAS – reliability as a service).

For example, in January last year bookmarking service Ma.gnolia announced that they had lost all the data due to data corruption. In March last year VC-backed online backup and storage provider Carbonite has lost data of 7,500+ customers who relied on the company to keep their files safe and in September 2009 Gmail was out for a couple of hours (Sep 09).

For more information on the MC DC, please visit our website (http://mcdc.insites.eu) or contact me.

The Park Plaza, London was the setting for the 2010 MRS conference; “a festival of ideas, innovation, and inspiration”. There can be no doubt that all three of these were achieved through the clever mix of speakers from within and without the Research industry.

The first guest to take the chair was Academy Award nominee Armando Ianucci. Research magazine’s editor Marc Brenner successfully demonstrated his qual interview techniques, managing to persuade the “hardman of politicial satire” to admit that he did ask people what they thought of his work before finalising it; even if it was just family and friends. Armando, had you broadened the sample, you never know, you might have won that Oscar for the nevertheless excellent “In the loop”. Thus the scene was set for frequent, and frankly not unexpected, digressions to the upcoming UK election, including numerous references to the industry’s infamous blunder in 1992.

Social media and communities, of course, remained a central thread for the proceedings, with an array of job titles thrust forward, aimed at demonstrating an agency’s ability to tap into this exponentially growing data stream. Social Media Knowledge Leader was a personal favourite. Doron Meyassad (Promise Communities) presented a paper discussing the opportunity for communities to allow large companies to rejuvenate their innovation pipeline through iterative co-creation. This was inspiring for any researcher who shares the view that long-term agency-client partnerships are the future of research. A witty client-side presentation by Darren Cornish (Axa) followed, concerning his change of focus from a technically minded Operations Director to becoming a social media advocate. His vision helped develop an internal community that successfully raised employee satisfaction and improved products resulting in greater sales revenue. Case studies such as these provide clear justification for the swift move of social media research up the value chain. In these times of media revolution we have the opportunity to ensure market research is used beyond the marketing department; we must take it. On this very theme, InSites’ Annelies Verhaeghe presented a rousing limerick extolling the virtues of genuinely listening to customers using observational research.

Alongside such visions of the future of research and how we can harness the digital consumer, there were numerous opportunities for researchers of all levels to hone their craft by listening to the experiences of industry experts, as well as those with more diverse backgrounds. Valuably, not all skills discussions were related to the process of research. Aptly named ‘Hothouses’, held in a steaming, packed seminar room included a talk by Executive Coach Paul Vittles outlining the necessity to step back from one’s work and focus on wider issues such as colleague satisfaction.

One of the most insightful lessons reminded us researchers that we should practice more of what we preach – ironically provided by a journalist (Brian Cathcart), in collaboration with Neil Swann (SwanUpping). Five tenets of effective journalism were introduced, followed by their potential application to the market research environment. Despite ignoring 80% of them in this blog, I summarize the rules below and hope we can all learn from them in the future.

1. Get to the point: the punchline comes first and the background – why the man bit the dog – is woven in beneath
2. Humanise the message: think about people before policies – use case studies/typologies that allow the audience to relate
3. Hierarchy of information must be clear: Presentations must be client focused, not producer focused – each chart should do a small number of things very well, in a clear and logical order
4. Make every word count: The best words are plain words, short words – and few of them
5. Ration the numbers: where possible change numbers into pictures; 28% becomes just over one quarter

72% of Internet users are part of at least one social network, which translates to 940 million users worldwide. These are the results of a global study among 2,800 Internet users. Eastern Europe and Asia are the regions with the lowest use (4 out of 10), while South America has the highest usage in terms of percentage (95%). Globally, Facebook remains the most popular online platform (51% use Facebook), followed by MySpace (20%) and Twitter (17%).

72% are members of two social network sites
The majority of surfers are members of two or more social network sites; this usually entails two sites used for private purposes. 16% are members of a professional network, of which LinkedIn is the most popular.

“It is becoming difficult for new social sites to recruit members. The majority of surfers are happy with their current situation and do not want to become members of a new platform. Furthermore, they do not intend to reduce their use of their current sites. There is therefore a certain degree of stability in this market,” explains Steven Van Belleghem, Managing Partner of InSites Consulting.

Twice per day and 195 friends
Users of social media log in on average twice per day. On professional sites this percentage is significantly lower, where the average is nine times per month. Different types of users exist: there are those who log in often though rarely write anything themselves and mainly observe others (14%). There is another group of 26% who frequently log in and write something every time they do.

The average social media user has 195 friends, in which South America is highest with an average of 360 friends, followed by Portugal with 236 friends and the United States with 200 friends.

Unfriending is a popular activity
58% of social media users have unfriended a friend. South American users are highest in this category too – 81% have removed people from their social network.

Check out the full report!

The Swedish Market Research Society invited Annelies Verhaeghe at their Swedish Market Research Day on 11 March. Annelies will present her ESOMAR presentation on ‘Getting answers without asking questions’, the evaluation of a TV program based on social media.

For more information about the Swedish Market Research Day, click here or contact Annelies.

Today Econsultancy announced its winners of the 2009 Innovation Awards. InSites Consulting is one of the lucky few to receive one of these awards, more specifically Innovation in Online Marketing Research or Customer Insight.

Our winning entry: Social media nethnography Click here for your free download.

We developed a new research paradigm called social media netnography that makes use of user-generated content on social media to answer a certain research question. The approach challenges the traditional research process in all phases. It helps marketers and researchers to enclose new quality information which is not easily available via traditional research. At the same time the methodology respects the research ecosystem because it does not demand the cooperation of research participants.

What the jury said: “This is how a great deal of research will be conducted in the future and a step change in the way that companies can get insight. Great use of user-generated content to answer questions in a way which makes invasive questions unnecessary.”

Want to find out more? Contact our ForwaR&D Lab team.