Navigation Guide to Social Media Research.

The Marketing Research Association (MRA) released a “Guide to the Top 16 Social Media Research Questions.

The guide covers: reliability, execution, interaction with other kinds of research, ethics and legal compliance, data quality, process, and outputs.

“‘Social media research’ refers to a set of techniques that include passively observing the thoughts, attitudes and opinions of people in public forums,” said Patrick Glaser, MRA’s director of research standards. “There is tremendous power in that, but also a great, urgent need for guiding principles and standards for related research. This guide moves us steadily in that direction and frames the conversation for the ongoing development of best practices by the industry.”

Jim Longo (Itracks), who headed the committee that developed the guide, noted that, “The recent explosion of social networks and an increasing demand for customers to publicly voice their opinions has changed the landscape of market research. As this trend continues to increase and evolve, our goal is to ensure that privacy standards are followed.” The guide is the first major piece of a broad effort to formalize best practices and standards in social media research.

As a set of techniques, social media research offers tremendous potential to inform business in answering important questions, such as customer satisfaction, marketing, product improvement and customer demand for new products. Annie Pettit, Ph.D. (Conversition Strategies), who served on the guide development committee, notes, “Social media research greatly expands the opinion researcher’s analytical toolkit. Moreover, the sheer volume of available information combined with the reduction in burden to the research participant makes it an extremely attractive research option.”

To download guide CLICK on link below;
http://www.mra-net.org/rq/documents/MRA_IMRO_SMR16.pdf>