Zsofia Bauer is a Head of Research at Ynsight, a qualitative research agency that makes actionable insights out of the unstructured open web. We had the pleasure to talk with her about qualitative research methodology netnography and Ynsight.
Q. Would you talk more about netnography and your methodology at Ynsight?
Our team specializes in netnography. Netnography is a passive research method based on observing online social interactions – online conversations, debates, discussions – without asking questions in contemporary communication networks.
At our research institute, we collect, organize, read, and analyze edited, and user-generated online content to make actionable and unbiased insights out of the unstructured open web.
We do not pose questions – we filter and interpret online content combining data mining with in-depth, unbiased qualitative analysis.
As the base of our research, we investigate traditional online platforms (their edited content as well as the comment sections), social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc), blogs, vlogs and other edited and user-based content distributors – overall 150 platform and channel types.
“We believe combining human interpretations with an algorithm can help us to achieve more complex overview”
Getting data from Facebook and Twitter is extremely expensive so we have a partner operating a worldwide social media monitoring platform, and with our research team we write syntaxes on the software that we use to filter the content criteria within the software. We use keywords to triangulate the topics, for example, topics could be female freedom or protest groups, what we do is write a syntax using all the keywords to extract specific data that we are looking for.
We are less focused on the data acquisition and software building and much more on the interpretation side of the data. We buy the data and interpret it by ourselves. At Ynsight we use a platform called Talkwalker.
Q. How do you analyse images?
In terms of image research, the software has its functionality, however, there still are some catches. When we analyze the MeMe(s) we need to carry out manual check-ups and we believe if you’re doing fully automatic social media analysis the words and meaning behind it might get lost, so we combine human interpretations with algorithms in order to achieve a more complex overview.
Q. How do you filter down your research?
We carry out marketing filters. It depends on the product, and it can go down to the city level, regional level or even it can reach up to language filters as well. We have interesting research about the Hungarian minority in Romania, Slovakia, and other territories. We were able to look at Romanian IP addresses, people who live in Transylvania and who are able to speak in Hungarian – what were their fears of covid and how they perceived their own home countries’ reactions versus what they saw in Hungary. Additionally, the financial side too – Hungary was sending numbers of aid to Ukrainian-Hungarians and Transylvanian-Hungarians and how that resonated with the community there and community here. We were able to see why we are sending help there. It was a very interesting multi-country project and at the same time looking at the conversations of British and American expats in Hungary and what they talk about in these situations.
Q. Has the pandemic affected your work and research?
The global pandemic has been affecting everyone at all different levels. We were lucky enough to carry out our research and work fully remotely. Since the research is online many new clients have joined, since, in-depth interviews and focus groups became unfeasible and we have tried out new methodologies.
The number of social media users has increased by 23% compared to the previous year. We have never experienced such a long lockdown. At Ynsight, we have written an article about social media in Hungary and last year Facebook gained 500 thousand new users, 82% of them were from Hungary. It has a lot to do with online education and schools were shut down, people have been signing up for social media. Also, we have noticed the new trend in social media of most news coming from official, government sources appearing first on Facebook as such lockdown rules are presented online, so many people created social media to keep up with the news.
Q. Can you tell us some examples of your activities? Are all your activities addressed to the corporate sector?
What we do at Ynsight is do all levels of market research, consumer, and the market using the data-based netnography method.
For example, an Italian company wants to open a coffee shop in Hungary and we would be looking at the KPI of the market size in Hungary, and consumer insights. Also, It would be interesting to see what Hungarians think about coffee and what the social triggers are and what market-related data are there as well as social media insights about coffee. What are the drivers, what kind of drinking habits people have? What they are looking for, how the pandemic affected or would affect this particular business in Hungary.
At Ynsight, we have carried out studies on Nescafe on the UK market. They wanted to improve the Nescafe sales and they had the whole marketing plan of how the coffee was so green and without any artificial additives. But they wanted to carry out full-length research beforehand and our research finds that people really did not have any problem with the artificial components; it had much more in-depth issues that people believed what they drink is not coffee. In other words, 3-in-1 or capsules were not believed to be authentic coffee by the consumers. It was totally interesting insights and after the research, they changed the marketing and sales strategy and most importantly finding out the root of the problem.
Sometimes we have researched Hungarian issues such as politics and finance and we can see how it can impact the global level, especially Hungarian communities abroad.
For example, in 2017 Central European University shut down and moved to Vienna, and it was interesting to see how it would impact the online community and how these global events are connected with social media, hashtags, and memes.
Or more recently, there was a politician who was arrested in Brussels, Belgium and we have looked at the global impact of its arrest and it was fascinating to see how people were regarding this situation from different parts of the world.
Q. Are you independent? Do you have any partners?
At Ynsight, we work independently and also in cooperation with different research institutes and agencies. We do collaborate with one in Switzerland, UK, and currently in conversation with an American research institute. We are lucky to have word of mouth and work with different Hungarian clients from different sectors. They recommended us to their regional offices, and it was a great opportunity to work with other international partners in Czech and Slovakia.
