Black Hat Research
Some phrases that jumped out at me from the #esoc (ESOMAR Online Research Conference) tweetstream:
“a tsunami of unstructured data”
“no mentions of representativeness, why not? Fit for purpose, not for rep.”
“ticks on the back of the information hippo”
“Just listen”
OK, I admit it, the hippo one was mine. But this was a theme of the online conference - data, data, everywhere, data that must be listened to. It must also conform to certain standards of quality, at least when we create it ourselves via surveys, but the definition of quality is subordinate to questions of usefulness - did the information help its buyer make a better decision?
Nothing wrong with that! But at conferences it’s also worth listening for the dogs which don’t bark - in this case privacy, ethics, consent, that kind of stuff. These have been growing topics at UK conferences, it surprised me they weren’t more under discussion here. At one point a guy from Facebook explained that no, they weren’t planning on opening the platform up to research too quickly because the user and her privacy came first. Given how keen Facebook are on advertisers this may not be as high-minded as it sounded, but even so the statement was a rebuke: you lot, he was implying, are not an industry that respects your participants terribly much.
Anyhow, it seems to me we have a nice little research storm brewing. First of all we have an increased pragmatism: as the industry has become more and more client-centric, we’ve moved to a point where the value of the information we sell lies in its ability to help a client make good decisions. It always has been, of course, but the information could be rated another way - how valid was it? It’s all very well saying “research was never representative”, but you don’t get off that easy - representativity might not have been achievable, but it was the ideal to strive for as best you could as you looked for validity. “Fit for purpose” as a test of validity is a big shift towards, essentially, deregulation.
Now, I love social media, I think it’s stuffed with valuable information, and in a sense deregulation suits me just fine. But the industry isn’t actually embracing ‘deregulation’ as such - quite the opposite: it’s bristling with new definitions, taxonomies, codes. And this is the second part of the storm: codification - because the landscape of research is in flux, industry bodies are trying to update their rules and principles, often for the very good reason that they want to stay out of any potential legislative trouble. After all, marketers are increasingly a target for government, why wouldn’t researchers be too?
And the third part of the storm is the sheer abundance of information that now exists about people. People are sharing more information but they’re also leaking more information all the time - not to research companies, but it’s out there and a lot of the time it’s public. This element WAS talked about at the conference but generally in the sense of it being a happy opportunity.
So what we have is a collision of pragmatism and codification in a context of abundance. And I’m saying what that’s going to lead to - it is already - is black hat research. It won’t be called that of course, it probably won’t even refer to itself as research and it won’t be at many of our conferences.
What is it? Well, you have the information gathering which happens within industry codes and conforms to industry quality standards. And you have the law which lays out what information you can actually legally gather but which is full of loopholes and grey areas and stuff. And black hat research is what happens between the codes and the law. Scraping and mashing up personal data, rogue PR surveying, push polling, communities that mix research with marketing… you can add your own, I’m sure. Black hat research is going to get bigger and bigger and more important, a shadowland of information and intelligence provision which passes the “fit for purpose” test but maybe not other ones we might set it.
