Future Thinking

Amanda Wheeler, PR and Communications Manager, interviews Nick Buckley, our New Social Media Director in the first of a series of informal conversations – hearing personal views about different aspects of the future of Research. Nick's role is to make connections between social-network based research initiatives across the company – sharing knowledge, solutions and vendor information. A former civil servant, Nick also has a background in web production and local information and community services – notably upmystreet.com.

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Amanda:

We’re hearing about Web2.0 all the time now – not to mention Enterprise2.0, Retail2.0 and so on. Is it still a useful or even respectable term to be using to think about our services?

Nick:

Yes – I think it is. Web2.0 is about a shift in power from the few… companies, organisations, professional web workers, to the many… in principle anyone. Web1.0 was about using resources and expertise to publish things that everyone else consumed as largely passive readers. That’s because the content and the form of what was on the web, the message and the presentation, were tied together. Imagine having to have the skills of a medieval manuscript illuminator just to write a note for the milkman. Web2.0 rides on technologies which have separated, at the user level, what people want to say from how it is recorded, transmitted and received. There are lots of complexities and nuances – but that change, and the resultant shift in control, will be seen by future historians as a real watershed in the story of web communications.

Amanda:

Why is it a shift in power?

Nick:

Because people – citizens, consumers – get to talk back. There have always been simple bulletin boards which allowed people a channel so long as someone with know how or resources made it available. But something like blogging has completely transformed things. Anyone can have a real platform for free, can define their own space, and crucially can connect to what other people are saying. Statements and opinions start to aggregate, and are easy for others to find and add to. None of this now requires the patronage or permission of a gatekeeper such as a television producer or a newspaper editor.

Amanda:

So retailers and manufacturers have to take notice?

Nick:

Yes. They can either get involved, and find ways of participating in these extended popular discussions, or they can watch whilst their most motivated critics, or even their competitors, do it for them.

Amanda:

So, the big question is, how does this affect Market Research?

Nick:

Too many ways to try to set out in one session, that’s for sure. But just to make the case for Web2.0 here are some examples…

Market Research has been part of the ‘back channel’, through which consumers and potential consumers feed back to retailers, manufacturers, regulators… We have ways of making that feedback usable, significant, comparable and so on. If Web2.0 is creating or amplifying a DIY ‘back channel’ for consumers then researchers, at worst, don’t want to miss out. But, far better, we can adapt our skills to making all this ‘user generated content’ much more meaningful and usable.

Similarly, whilst many Web2.0 networks arise organically, we need to adapt all our skills around recruitment, motivation and incentivisation, feedback and closure, to ensure that our clients reap the full potential.

There’s also, still, an awful lot of hype and obscurity around the rising use of Web2.0 and the associated online social networks. Who are the people who are using   the new services, and to what end, and therefore when is a Web2.0 perspective on the population (or on a niche group) particularly useful or particularly misleading? This is where all our existing modes of research and our existing studies come into play – to create a really informed picture of Web2.0 users, and to track changes in this.

Amanda:

If that’s the main argument – that Market Research will have to understand and harness the world of Web2.0 in order not to be by-passed - are there other ways that we are having to respond?

Nick:

It’s a truism, but we have to anticipate the future… however difficult that might be. The technology, and the business models developed by those providing it to the public, are changing so quickly that we can’t just pile into one model – say Blogging or Online Communities – and try to consolidate methods and products that we expect to stand for ten, or even five, years. So we have to immerse ourselves in the ‘world’ of Web2.0 and understand both the popular and the commercial trends following behind the technology. That, itself, is knowledge that we can share with our clients – our experiments with interviewing inside virtual worlds are a case in point.

Alongside all this we are having to think increasingly about the Open Source movement - how its principles extend far outside its original application to software development - and also to think about combining information and insights from many different sources.  

Amanda:

It’s hard to see where our use of Web2.0 as a research tool stops, and the influence of Web2.0 on our own working practices begins.

Nick:

I think that’s right – this seems to be something which simultaneously affects the world we are observing, the methods we use to make those observations, and the way we ourselves collaborate, manage knowledge, and communicate. That’s why we are experimenting with formats like blogging to open ourselves up to a much more informal conversation with anyone who is interested in the same things as us. The new blog is a case in point – this isn’t about just using a blog platform as a publishing tool – we’re genuinely open to comments and arguments.

Amanda:

So is Web2.0 changing the world?

Nick:

I don’t think it’s doing so on its own. Anyone who does is probably spending too much time in front of a screen. But Web2.0 is woven together with many other trends – such as globalisation, interest in ethical and environmental principles, many other technological developments and above all an increasingly diverse, almost splintered, pattern of individual ideas, beliefs and motivations. I think Web2.0 is amplifying some of these changes but is also being shaped and fed by them. It may even give us some early indicators of where those other trends are going – such as the rise of new powerful economies.

Amanda:

And Web3.0?

Nick:

Just now I don’t buy into that idea of a sequence. I think Web2.0 is much more before and after, in a BC/AD sort of way. What it applies to is people more than the technology. There’s just the one time that ‘most people’ get to broadcast and listen to ‘most other people’. On that score, thinking globally, maybe Web2.0 hasn’t even happened yet – although all the necessary means are now available. No – I’m not looking for Web3.0

But who knows…