Ipsos Mori harnesses social media

People are becoming less responsive to telephone polling

Polling giant Ipsos Mori is improving its web capability and acquiring specialist online businesses in an attempt to overcome problems with face-to-face and phone-based research.

Ipsos acquired Californian online consumer research business OTX last month, following the buyout of Argentinian social networking research and data collection services provider Livra last summer to bolster its web expertise. Both acquisitions will help it make better contacts with its respondents.

“Contact is one of our biggest challenges. In some markets face-to-face doesn’t work, people are becoming less responsive to phone calls and many households do not have landlines and only use mobile phones,” said Ben Booth, Ipsos Mori global chief technology officer.

“However, reaching people online has its own difficulties – you can manage a panel of respondents over the web but there are problems with getting them involved, especially across the younger layer of the population,” said Booth.

“For example, most communication between teens online takes place on platforms such as Facebook, so if we are going to engage with these people we have to take advantage of these media [tools],” he said.

According to Nielsen Research, time spent on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter jumped 82 per cent during 2009 and this increase in the use of such tools has helped convince Ipsos that it had to rethink its online research model.

The firm is also using new techniques such as web mining, which sees patterns extracted from online data, and looks at data content, structure and usage.

The introduction of web mining plays a key role in the organisation’s strategy, where an off-the-shelf tool has been redeveloped to collect specific information – such as opinions about a particular product or service – from any web site.

It then produces analytical data, which is delivered to Ipsos Mori customers.

“Paper communications have moved online and are becoming much more distributed and diversified, so we have to be in that space, whether it is to measure advertising or get respondents,” said Booth.