Category Archives: cyburbia

The Top Odd Social Media Research Requests

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We’ve completed over 280 and research projects for clients now in sectors covering healthcare, oil & gas, non-profits, governments, tourism and more. Along the way, we’ve received some strange requests for research, investigations or doing other analytical work…keeping in mind our research is all cyberspace focused; social media, news media etc. So we thought we’d share some of the odder requests we get…we shared some a couple of years ago, so here’s the latest.

Is President Obama an Alien?
We had a good chuckle with this one. We can say the request came from the U.S. itself. This person or group, thought perhaps there was evidence online through social media channels or elsewhere, that President Obama is an alien. So after a good chuckle we declined.

Why Isn’t My Cat Popular?
This lady had spent a fair bit of time building up her cat’s profile on Facebook and wanted to start “tweeting” on behalf of her cat. She only had a few hundred “likes” on Facebook and felt her cat was very funny and cute and deserved more followers. She wanted to know what the problem was – with people. Moved right along on that one…

Strategy for Selling Weed Online
Via an anonymous email, this person wanted some research into the best ways to sell marijuana via social media without being caught by the police. That person was smart to use an anonymous email address at least, not so smart on the request point.

Will Pay Based on The Riches We Shall Make
We get a few of these in varying flavours every year. Some person has invented something or come up with a great marketing idea. If we’ll do the market research and help them with a social media strategy, they will pay us vast sums of money from the riches they will make…surefire guaranteed success! Uhm, pass…

Can We Delete Our Competitors Social Media Content
Yes indeed. We have a magic wand to wave at the mystical Web and all you’re competitions content will be wiped away in an instant. This was a good chuckle for the team indeed. And a reminder to anyone that no, content cannot be deleted unless every server it is on in the world deletes it or shuts down.

Heartbreaker: Could We Find a Missing Person?
We actually wish we could. It would be a great service. This was a hard one to take from an obviously distressed patient. It’s the kind of miracle we would love to be able to perform.

Please Prove Christianity is the Number One Online Religion
Spirituality is, we believe, and important part of human existence. These guys were a tad over the top however, convinced that Christianity was the most popular religion in the world and it could be proved with some online research. We do not conduct any work for any religious groups. Our goal is to ne as neutral as possible.

Social Media Use in Atlantic Canada Report #5

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We are pleased to be releasing today on our blog, the 5th annual Atlantic Conversations, a report on social media usage in Atlantic Canada that is relevant to government, corporations and other organisations engaging in social media. While the report is based around Atlantic Canada, it is often relevant to other parts of Canada and the United States.

Download Here (PDF format): Atlantic Convo5-Badger2012.

Report Dedicated To: PeaceGeeks, a non-profit that brings technical savvy to grassroots organisations in developing nations, help them leverage the advantages of technology.

Highlights of the Report:

Social media isn’t just about entertainment: In 2012, we saw the most significant shift in use of social media by citizens to discussion on citizens issues. In the past year, political and local issues featured prominently in the discussions and anyone who thinks it’s just kids using these tools might be very surprised.

Google+ Is Growing: For many, the assumption was Google+ was either dead or just the domain of the techies. That certainly isn’t the case. We were surprised how fast Google+ grew in the region. For many, Google+ is seen as having better privacy rules and people prefer the “information flow” over that of Facebook.

Business & Social Networking: The fastest growing social network tool in the region was LinkedIn, mostly the domain of professionals. The increase in usage was significant at well over 60% including usage of discussion groups and company pages. Clearly, the regions professionals are finding the value in this business networking tool.

Provincial Growth in Social Media Use: Newfoundland Labrador saw the most significant growth in social media use in the region, followed by PEI. This is significant in that it shows adoption of these tools across the region is far beyond just youth as the 35+ demographic is increasingly engaged.

Download the free version to find out more. The complete version is available for sale at $995. plus tax, just send us an email or give us a ring. The full version will be available on January 30th, 2013.

Unions & Social Media Engagement Ranked

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In October of 2011 we introduced our first ranking of the primary unions engagement in social media in America and Canada. Today we provide an update just over a year later. It’s only natural that unions would adopt these technologies – they understand grass-roots organising very well. In the case of AFL-CIO in America and IBEW in Canada, these unions can help businesses, governments and other organisations understand the highly effective use of these tools. Almost all of the unions in the USA and Canada increased their presence in the primary social media channels, although some smaller unions seem to have either not increased their presence or decreased enagagement.

Social Media Use by American Unions
Certainly the AFL-CIO remains the leader in usage of social media, with IBEW close on their heels. The biggest leap forward came from IUPA who seem to have put on a push to engage and consistently update content in social media channels. Interestingly, IAFF declined in overall engagement, but was the only union to decline. Most of the others either made small steps forward or stayed the same. As a union may have stayed the same, it does not mean they didn’t actually progress – they may very well have found that the level of engagement they have works well given available resources and the overall quality.

Social Media Use by Canadian Unions
Canadian unions really jumped in with both feet in 2012 it would appear. ACTRA, representing actors made the biggest leap with content and overall engagement. ACTRA has also been exceptionally good (like IBEW in Canada) at creating content across multiple channels. Both CWA and TWU decreased a fair bit in their engagement. They reduced the amount of content and remain disengaged with online members; this may mean they haven’t yet found operational value to engagement and may not have the financial and human resources. It is not a reflection on the union itself. CUPE and PSAC saw definite gains in their use of social media as well.

Summary of Social Media Use by Unions
What we can definitively see is that unions have understood the power of these tools above many businesses and governments. They have set social media policies and internal governance in their use of these tools and are effective in their implementation. They also excel at engagement with their members, enabling members to share and upload their own content such as videos and images. The main form of content unions have found works (we estimate) is video and images, of which extensive use has been made. Another important aspect to recognise here is that unions understand that social media are not just about kids, since their members are skilled working adults.

Methodology
To assess use, we first collected data from across all unions in the US and Canada. From here we parsed down the data and analysed which unions a) used the most channels, b) what was their influence and authority (our own algorithms and 3rd party tools such asKlout for verification), c) frequency of communications and d) participation with audience. These primary points were compared between 2010, 2011 and 2012 (30 November.) There was statistical variation allowance for populations in each country and unions size to enable more accurate comparions. Based on the above criteria, we assigned a “rank” from 1 to 9 with a 9 being very engaged and 1 being hardly engaged at all (perhaps just 1 or social media channels with little active use.) The data provided herein is the aggregate of that collected for client research projects and does not provide confidential information given to clients.

Note: There are other unions that are engaged in social media channels. We assessed the most prominent unions in terms of volume of content, overall engagement and presence in cyberspace (not just social media.) If you think we missed something, let us know.

Mining, Social Media & Corporate Social Responsibility

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In this research, we wanted to understand if Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) important to urban Canadians? In short, yes, but this varies across Canada. As the issue ranked fairly high for investors looking into mining stocks, we thought it worth taking a look at what Canadians in major cities think about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and to what extent it is an important issue. We measured the volume and weight of discussions around CSR in Halifax, Toronto, Hamilton, Winnipeg, Calgary and Vancouver and here’s how those cities ranked comparing men and women.

 

 

In this chart, we ranked the importance citizens placed on CSR in various cities across Canada, with a 9 being very important. The sample size was 500 individuals in each city. We confirmed them to be resident in Canada, although we cannot confirm if they are Canadian citizens or not. Certainly a CSR program is of importance to Canadians (we may at a later date conduct a historical analysis on the growth of interest and awareness and the reasons or perceptions around CSR to citizens.)  It is curious as to why Toronto has such a high level of neutrality in a city with a significant role in mining?

Hot Topics for Tourists in Social Media

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Food. It seems tourists in North America (USA & Canada) love to chat more about the food experiences they had on vacation than where they stayed, at least that’s the trend we saw in 2011 and are predicting into 2012. The topic of food has continuously increased since 2009 while discussions around property (hotel, motel, resort, B&B etc.) has steadily declined.

So why has food become more of an interest? We’re not sure there’s a definitive answer. Perhaps it has something to do with the increase in television food channels, cooking lessons via YouTube and a general gastronomy trend across North America? That might take a bit more research and we’ll be checking our aggregate data for insights.

 

When we delved into the topic of food, we found that 78% of the time tourists were looking for local cuisine and that ranged from greasy burgers to fine gourmet meals. We also found that food has become part of the experience planning for tourists; while they won’t plan all their meals they will look at having at least one posh meal and attempt to have a local experience. For restaurant owners, this represents an opportunity to partner with local inns, B&Bs or boutique hotels if you want a slice of that crowd.

Although it may be a trend, it is our view this will continue for sometime. Surprisingly we also saw a decline in the discussion of local attractions and this was largely around theme parks as we’ve seen a downward trend in family vacation planning unless it is more regional. We also note an increased volume of discussion by empty-nesters and professionals without families, perhaps as they have a higher disposable income in this tough financial period.

The data shown here is the aggregate data from over 40 online tourism research projects we’ve conducted for tourism authorities, boards and operators in the U.S., Canada and UK.

So…why do you think food is a hot topic?