Listen+Learn Research believes that to really understand the human experience you need to close the dashboard, roll your sleeves up, and get reading.
To really understand the human experience you need to close the dashboard, roll your sleeves up, and get reading.
Jeremy Hollow Founder Listen+Learn Research
We know that social data has the potential to help us better understand people and their lives. After all, it’s millions of people around the world sharing their thoughts, emotions, and experiences, and it’s there, just waiting to be observed. No more surveys or the same twelve people munching away on your sandwiches in a focus group.
It’s data that’s raw, natural, unfiltered. It’s data that can give researchers unique insights that cannot be found anywhere else. Later we share an example of how social data can help reveal to us aspects of life that traditional research simply can’t reach.
Of course, there are still limits to the usual approach to social data. Something which makes finding new insight harder than it needs to be, leaving people frustrated and in danger of walking away from its potential.
You know the tale of the tortoise and the hare? Well, something similar is happening in how we’re using social data for research. Instead of the tortoise and the hare, or qual vs. quant, it’s more like the Speed Skater vs. the Free Diver.
This is what lies at the heart of the frustration.
Let’s start with the idea that social data is like a huge ocean of human experience, in the middle of winter...
The Speed Skater is where most of the social intelligence / social insight market is right now.
Their data is the ice, the listening tools are the skates and the racetrack, and the analyst is the skater.
As you’d expect, the Skater is all about speed. They’re quick off the blocks, explosive energy pushing them forward. They quickly cover a lot of ground, getting from question to answer in hours if not days. Quick, agile, nimble.
What we get from social data tends to come from the Speed Skaters. They stay in their lane. Their exposure to and interpretation of the human experience comes from dashboards and analytics. It’s clinical, precise. You see what can be counted – those data points that are frozen in time. It’s all very quantitative.
But there’s more than one way to enjoy the water.
What we gain from quickly skating over the data shouldn’t blind us to what’s underneath. We shouldn’t always run the same race on the same track – in doing so, we’ll only know what everyone else knows.
Ice rests on the top and is the easiest thing to see, but we’re all aware that most of the ocean lies beneath. There’s a vast body of fascinating data, rich in life, just waiting to be found. It’s dynamic, living, evolving – the sum of millions of human experiences, opinions, and emotions.
This is the domain of the Free Diver. They’re free to go deep into the human experience, to follow different leads, explore different paths, and to immerse themselves in the depths of the human experience.
For the Free Diver, the data is a vast unexplored ocean, listening tools are the fins and mask and the diver isn’t one person, but a team of specialist social insight researchers.
The Speed Skater sees the track laid out neatly before them (sentiment analysis, statistics on engagement, topic counts).
The Free Diver is more connected to the water and the life below. They’re in deep. They feel what people feel, they hear what people say, they’re sensitive to what people experience. It’s a much deeper level of human touch. It’s emotional and experiential rather than basic analytics.
The Free Diver respects the ocean and their role within it. They know their limits and the nature of the world they’re exploring. They know they need to plan their trip while being open to change and adapt their approach as they go. They frame rather than constrain how they experience and interpret the human experience.
This is where you find new insight.
How a leading cancer charity challenged their blind spots – getting beneath the surface of receiving a cancer diagnosis to transform how they deliver services.
Our client’s role is to be there for everyone with cancer, right from the moment they’re diagnosed. However, previous research showed they weren't reaching everyone at this critical moment, and they needed to be.
Their goal is to there at the right time, in exactly the right way. But they didn't always know how and trying to find out was incredibly challenging. It was their blind spot but one they needed to address. To do this, they needed a new approach…
Why was this such a challenge? Well, some questions just can’t be asked. How can you ask people about this raw, brutal and life-changing moment when it’s happening? How would you start, what would you ask, how could you even find them?
There are a whole host of obstacles in the way of traditional research, but they knew it was too important to shy away from.
So, they wanted to try something new, to crack beneath the surface of this moment. They knew doing so could transform their impact, the way they design, plan and deliver services, communicate and engage with people.
They came to us to give social insight a go, to find people at that critical moment and hear in their own words how it felt to be diagnosed.
We discovered people, lots of people. We heard about their experiences, feelings, fears and needs at this rawest of times. But we didn’t find them with data analytics, mentions and likes. We didn’t do it using word clouds and sentiment. We did it through a blend of social quant and qual.
We found people sharing their lives with each other and new friends for the journey they were suddenly on. We found an incredible richness in people’s stories that revealed their experiences and what they needed most but so often lacked. Humanity.
We found three insight themes:
i. The emotional depth and intensity: We heard the fears and anxieties and understood why they existed. For example, we got to understand the 'nature of fear'. We heard what people couldn't say in real life, to their friends and families, but could with others 'like them', in the anonymous safety of forums. We found where this was happening and when; that it's active all day, and that it’s at night when the fear and loneliness really hits. And we understood the language of the newly diagnosed, the metaphors and conversational etiquette they used.
ii. The extent of people’s unmet needs: The questions people asked in social showed what they really needed at this time of huge uncertainty and confusion. We heard about the disconnect between well-meaning professionals when they deliver news, and what needs to be better.
iii. The evolving nature of the experience: It's not static or linear. It changes, there is a journey, and different types of people navigating it. We understood the changing nature of needs from diagnosis into treatment and beyond. The emotional highs and lows, challenges and celebrations which revealed the shifting needs and how to address them in a tailored, person-centered way.
Understand this moment was important to many different parts of or their operations. Workshopping the results brought this to life for people from strategy, service delivery, and online community management, to marketing, comms and digital.
Main outcomes:
i. Communications: This helped them understand how to connect and engage with people at this moment, in the right place with the right message. It showed the importance of their own online community and the need to integrate this with a new Diagnosis campaign. This led to changing the focus of the website – concentrating on those questions people really want to ask.
ii. Information + Support services: The work shaped assets to support each interaction, e.g. information pages online and materials offline. These now contain more personal stories, and content is tailored better to people’s needs and in language suited to the audience and their stage in the cancer journey.
iii. SEO + Community: They knew communities were crucial and its own was an important asset. But social insight showed it wasn't being found by the people who needed it. The research helped their digital teams address this. It also led to content, delivery and structural changes to the community itself. E.g. signposting of information, the language used by moderators (or people handling their call line), the flow of materials and navigation.
Social media has the potential to achieve what all organizations are looking for: to really understand and know how to connect with people. As our client discovered, social is, by its very nature, a vast ocean of human expression, experience and connections. It let them find what truly matters to the people it wants to support. It let them move beyond seeing them as just numbers, data points or trendlines, and recognise them as people needing help.
