“Immerse Yourself” Qualitative Research Consultants Association 2012
This year’s meeting of the annual QRCA Conference was held in Montreal, Canada. How fitting for CETRA – a bunch of qualitative researchers in a French-speaking country with only one language company to support them 🙂
While CETRA exhibited, of course, we attended sessions as well! David Van Nuys, Ph.D., talked about different features of Google+. Most interesting was the Google Hangout feature, free video conferencing for up to 10 people, which can also allow you to share presentations and diagrams. There is also an option to do “Hangouts on Air,” which automatically publishes meetings to YouTube. Researchers shared tips about using this functionality, which allows online focus groups to be shared with the end clients through private YouTube video accounts.
Another interesting session was led by Annie Pettit, of the famous blog LoveStats, in which she spoke about social media research and the most effective way to implement this kind of research. There are many different advantages to using social media research, such as offering a ton of variables, allowing for instant results, and allowing for unrivaled segmentation variety.
She also described situations such as research for awareness or incidence, where social media tracking does not work. How often do you tweet about McDonalds? Or Target? Probably never, but you certainly are aware of them. She also gave tips about keywords: how often will your results be skewed if you target something like, “brown”? It could be Bobbi Brown, Scott Brown, brown hair, etc. Overall, it gave an excellent overview of social media research.
The QRCA put a special focus on growing its international presence, especially when the organization presented two global scholarships to researchers Angelica (Angie) Viguri from Mexico City, Mexico and Jurie Smit from Wellington, South Africa. CETRA learned a lot about how it can support the market research (#mrx) community and how we can provide support through translation of online bulletin boards, real-time translation in chat groups, simultaneous interpretation of focus groups, etc. to facilitate international research. CETRA hopes to continue to support the QRCA in their commitment to promoting sound qualitative research practices throughout the world. Until 2013 in San Diego!
