Web 2.0 and Research 2.0
– what’s it all got to do with surveys?
Peter Wills
CEO Snap Surveys
You’d be forgiven if the terms Web 2.0 and Research 2.0 mean little or nothing to you. I suspect that you’ve not had a visit from IT insisting that you upgrade to the latest 2.0 of something or other. So what’s all the fuss about?
Web 2.0
The term became popular following a 2004 conference entitled Web 2.0, organised by Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media. Although it has had its critics in that it has nothing to do with an official technical release of the internet, it should be clearly viewed as the latest evolution of the world wide web.
Web 2.0 can best be viewed as the move away from simply downloading information from the web (early web sites were simply an electronic company brochure), to one where every single one of us can provide feedback, contribute and interact.
Perhaps the best explanation of Web 2.0 is by way of a couple of examples, and for this, we’ll assume that everything before Web 2.0 must be Web 1.0 by default:
Encyclopaedias in Web 1.0 would be typified by Britannica Online (http://www.britannica.com/ )– a huge wealth of information written by selected authors that are specialists in their field. Just access a subject area and read the content. Web 2.0 has seen the rise of Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org/ ), which can be viewed as the people’s encyclopaedia, allowing anybody to contribute on any subject, adding richness to the content, if not always total accuracy. Critics may well focus on the accuracy but the power of Wikipedia cannot be underestimated in that it has a far greater breadth of information than a traditional encyclopaedia, it is permanently up to date and covers many esoteric subjects not normally covered by such reference books.
Newsprint went online some years ago with newspapers producing electronic versions of their daily papers. In those Web 1.0 days, the format of the electronic newspaper was almost identical to the printed version. Today, the format is quite different from the printed version, with a plethora of news feeds from podcasts to blogs to RSS feeds for instant updates. Today, any member of the public, armed with a mobile phone or video camera, can be a budding journalist.
Other initiatives that typify the arrival of Web 2.0 include:
- Blogs (A weblog, or simply a blog, is a website which contains periodic, reverse chronologically ordered posts on a common webpage)
- Forums (an easy to use method of communicating for particular interest groups, from Snap Surveys to Harley Davidson bikes to Mini cars)
- Google Adsense (adding adverts to a website by matching website content to a supplier’s offerings)
- Flickr (the online photo management system)
- Facebook and MySpace (two leading social networking sites).
There have never been any standards published to fully define Web 2.0, and consequently, it can mean different things to different people. However, by viewing some of the advances on the web over the past 4-5 years, it is clear that Web 2.0 is happening, and presumably it won’t be long before someone suggests Web 3.0 – no doubt they’ll launch a conference on the back of it, and off we go again….
Web 2.0 and the Research Industry
How are the concepts of Web 2.0 going to affect the Market Research Industry? Will the agencies within the industry be as slow on the uptake of Web 2.0 as they were on the arrival of the internet and the resulting online surveys?
On the basis that you can recognise the pioneers as the ones with the arrows in their backs, the Market Research industry is justified in being somewhat cautious, but to their credit, some organisations are taking the initiative and we are likely to see major changes as to how research is being carried out in the future.
Most industries are latching onto that “2.0” suffix and so we have seen Business 2.0 and Marketing 2.0. It is not surprising that the market research industry has now adopted Research 2.0 (though other areas of Research, other than Marketing, are bound to be using the same label for their industry sector).
Research 2.0
The traditional view of quantitative market research is to construct a questionnaire with a set of structured questions, a set of replies and a well defined routing structure, with probable restrictions placed on the number of responses to each question. The reasons for such an approach are quite justified but perhaps we should start to think differently. Should our research always be so structured? How do we harness that huge resource of comment and discussion that is generated by forums, social networking sites and blogs? Is Second Life just sad or a real opportunity?
Ipsos Mori have done some experimental work on their Opinionator, a website that allowed users to submit their opinions in the form of statements that others could rate or comment on. The details can be found at www.ipsos-mori.com/online/web2.pdf.
Nielsen BuzzMetrics have been working on tracking the activity of blogs and have created BlogPulse with various tools to track blog activity on key issues, people, news stories, news sources etc. (www.blogpulse.com/about.html).
Second Life is a 3-D virtual world created entirely by its residents. It opened in 2003 and there are now millions of residents around the globe. It has been viewed by some as an opportunity for market research agencies to offer their services and some manufacturers are even considering Second Life as a possible environment for testing their new products (secondlife.com/whatis/).
These types of scenarios are not likely to see the death of questionnaires, in the same way that the arrival of internet surveys did not see the demise of the paper survey. However, new forms of research will appear, new agencies will be formed with specific expertise in these techniques, and buyers of research will be faced with ever more difficult decisions on which routes to take. However, in a world where response rates are falling and panels are failing to be a cost effective solution, new techniques must therefore be explored.
Research 2.0 should be seen as both a threat and an opportunity. The market research industry is changing and those working within it need to take these changes on board or get left behind.
How will Snap Surveys respond to Research 2.0?
We’ve been monitoring developments on the web for some time to evaluate opportunities for our users. Our forum has been running for a couple of years and has been useful for users to share experiences, and has been beneficial for us to monitor the issues of the day.
As for future developments of our software, we’ve already been working on new ways of carrying out surveys, some of which were presented at the recent ASC conference in Southampton. Dr Steve Jenkins, our Technical Director, and Dr Nicola Stanley of Silver Dialogue presented the results of experimental work into new forms of presenting questions on the web. These involved various graphical sliders and 2-dimensional mapping to determine whether the responses were different from more traditional questionnaire formats. It is highly likely that many of the results of this research will appear in future versions of Snap, and we will continue to monitor the opportunities of the web as a vehicle for our users to carry out research.
If you have any views that you’d like to share, do email me at pwills@snapsurveys.com or use the Snap Forum to open up a discussion…