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.’