Hi, this is Li here, I just done a research for my college project on this forum, here are my findings, please feel free give me any feedbacks. Thanks.
Reflection 1
As for the assignment is to conduct a research of an online consumption-related forum or community and need to be shared in Google+, but the stream in Google+ does not support images between texts, so I decided to share my reflections on pages of my blog and share the link in Google+.
I will be using netnography to conduct my research. Netnography as a methodology for consumer and marketing research has been introduced in the late 1990s (Kozinets, 1998). Online communication between consumers has been studied by using netnography (Kozinets, 1998; Kozinets, 2002) for understanding their attitudes, perceptions, imagery, and feelings.
Mobile phone industry has grown tremendously in the last few years, as well as Samsung Brand. I am planning my research on Samsung products specially the mobile phone Samsung Galaxy S I9000 which really got Samsung into the leaders of global market. And this smart phone model is announced in March 2010, most smart phone forums opens for products around the time when the phone announce. There would be one and half years of data in the online community for me to do research on.
Generally, online communities should be preferred that have either (1) a more focused and research question relevant segment, topic or group, (2) higher “traffic” of postings, (3) larger numbers of discrete message posters, (4) more detailed or descriptively rich data, and (5) more between-member interactions of the type required by the research question. (Kozinets 2001)
Before commence my research, I will need to choose an online community to work on. Starting by searching on Google of “Samsung galaxy forum”, the top 3 organic results are all pointing to
http://www.samsunggalaxysforum.com, and there are other forums on the first page are
http://samsunggalaxysforum.com/samsung-galaxy-s/ ;
http://www.talkandroid.com/android-forums/samsung-galaxy/; other results are about Samsung Galaxy Tablet and other Samsung products.
www.samsunggalaxysforum.com How to
2871 Posts
702 Topics
Introduce Yourself
2441 Posts
962 Topics
Troubleshooting
10943 Posts
2508 Topics
Announcements
433 Posts
47 Topics
Samsaung galaxy discussion
4002 Posts
940 Topics
Lounge (Off-topic)
354 Posts
116 Topics
Samsung Galaxy S updates
4155 Posts
398 Topics
Other Samsung Galaxy S Devices
14 Posts
6 Topics
Samsung Galaxy S Rooting
2991 Posts
326 Topics
Samsung Galaxy S Accessories
378 Posts
85 Topics
Talking a detailed look into these three sites, I found that
http://www.samsunggalaxysforum.com had the most interactive posts and this forum is only about the target products I want to research on. Also they have 37418 total registered members. The domain name shows exactly what I was looking for and so would be people searching for a Samsung Galaxy community to join. The forum divided into several sections: Introduce yourself, Troubleshooting, How to etc. which all had a few thousand of topics.
The other two forums are Android (Google developed mobile operating system) forums and Samsung Galaxy S is a sub forum in the community.
After comparison, I choose
http://www.samsunggalaxysforum.com as my research community.
This table shows the structure and amount of topics and posts in each section of the forum.
From the amount of Topics and posts which roughly indicates the popularity of subject.
Troubleshooting; Discussion; introduce; how to; updates; rooting; lounge; accessories; announcement; other devices.
Reflection 2
In order to conduct the research in netnography, there are certain procedures need to be followed:
Referring to common ethnographic procedures, Kozinets (2002, p. 63) recommends the following methodological stages and procedures for netnographic studies:
1. Entrée: formulation of research questions and identification of appropriate online forum for study
2. Data collection: direct copy from the computer-mediated communications of online community members and observations of the community and its members, interactions and meanings
3. Analysis and interpretation: classification, coding analysis and contextualization of communicative acts
4. Research ethics: “
(1) The researcher should fully disclose his or her presence, affiliations, and intentions to online community members during any research;
(2) The researchers should ensure confidentiality and anonymity of informants;
(3) The researchers should seek and incorporate feedback from members of the online community being researched…
(4) The researcher should take a cautious position on the private-versus-public medium issue. This procedure requires the researcher to contact community members and to obtain their permission (inform consent) to use any specific postings that are to be directly quoted in the research” (Kozinets, 2002, p. 65; cf. Kozinets & Handelman, 1998).
5. Member checks: presentations of some or all final research report’s findings to the people who have been studied in order to solicit their comments. First we start with entrée:
Entrée: There are two initial steps that market researchers will find useful as preparation for conducting a “netnography.”
First, researchers must have specific marketing research questions and then identify particular online forums appropriate to the types of questions that are of interest to them.
Secondly, they must learn as much as possible about the forums, the groups, and the individual participants they seek to understand. (Kozinets 2003, p. 6),
After choosing the right forum to start research, I will need to prepare research question as conduct the interactions and communications during my research.
1. Where are they coming from?
2. What is the purpose of this community
3. What topics are talked about
4. Identify different kind of participants
5. Identify issues with the product
6. Find the motivation of this community
Reflection 3:
Before begin research as an ethic manner, I should full disclose my research position on the forum for study reasons. A topic is posted in Introduce Yourself section indicating my purpose of research of this forum. And a direct message was sent to administrator and site creator to inform my existence and ask for permission to use his posts in my research, also guaranteed anonymity in mentioning in research.
Here is the reply from administrator:
Here is the introduction post to state my existence:
“Hi, I am Jing Li from Dublin, a college student doing marketing also a huge android fan, also owns a Samsung Galaxy S I9000. At the moment I am doing my college research project, need to carry out a Netnography research on a forum and analyse online tribalism and consumer behaviour. This forum would be best for me to do my research. I am asking permission to quote contents from the forum to my research findings and results. All quoted comments will be anonymous. I would post my findings on the forum for everyone to see and comment as the research done.
Thanks in advance
Jing Li “
I have worked out the questions for the marketing research, now is to dive in and learn about the community.
As mentioned before, the forum is made from several sections:
From the amount of Topics and posts which roughly indicates the popularity of subject.
Troubleshooting; Discussion; introduce; how to; updates; rooting; lounge; accessories; announcement; other devices.
Introduce yourself
This section is for new members to tell about their self and members get to know each other, demographics and reason why there are on this site. There are 963 posts which mean 963 registered members of this forum introduced their self when they join this community and open for conversation. And there are 2446 replies which mean average each member’s introduction had more than 2 replies in this case greetings from other members.
Announcement
This section is about the news of forum and site updates and posting regulations.
Lounge
Off topic conversations
Other Samsung Galaxy S devices
Sub forums for other Galaxy devices
How to…. (703 topics and 2874 replies)
Here is the place you can find the guides and tutorials for how to do thing to make the product user experience better, here is an important place which many of the tutorials are posted by administrators, moderators, devotees who spent time share their experiences and expertise to members..
Troubleshooting (2510 posts and 10948 replies)
This is the place you go to ask questions about your device, here you can get advices from other members. This section’s posts are normally posted by new users or novice users. The answers and interactions can be from any member from this forum who had experience or know the answer to specific question. And this section is the most posts and replies. There are many tourists who do not have social ties with community who are only looking for a specific answer here too. This section is also contains several category of question for particular area of problem: Kies (Samsung’s synchronization software);
Samsung Galaxy S Discussions (940 posts 4004 replies)
Anything general discussions about Samsung Galaxy S, there are lots of questions as well, seems many people mentioning their problems with the device. This is a good place to find out what are the issues with the product. Samsung Galaxy S updates
This section is about the software updates for the device, majority of the posts are about sharing resources of new operating system updates and how to upgrade or flash the operating system updates. To implement the guides in this section require more technical knowledge. Topics 398 Replies 4158
Samsung Galaxy S Rooting (Topics 326 Replies2991)
This section is about how to Rooting (a term for hacking the device to gain administrator rights) the device.
Samsung Galaxy S Accessories (Topics 85 Replies 378)
This section people talk about accessories for the device and share problems and idea about it.
Reflection 4
Starting collet data for research, it seems there is a huge amount of source of information for the research compares to traditional research and working with large amount of texts try to put them into contexts and categories, coding the information can be strenuous. With the help of organizing research software and forum search function can makes it easier.
As data analysis commences (often concomitant with data collection), the netnographer must contextualize the online data, which often proves to be more challenging in the social cues impoverished online context of “netnography.” Software solutions such as the QSR NVivo and Atlas.ti qualitative analysis packages can expedite coding, content analysis, data linking, data display, and theory-building functions (Paccagnella 1997, Richards and Richards 1994).
After check on Google for QSR NVivo and Atlas.ti, reviews and tutorials, both of them have similar function for collecting and organizing data for research. NVivo 9 seems to be more user friendly to me as the interface is similar to office software package.
Direct copying data into NVivo9
1. Copy tittles from forum to word document
2. Import into NVivo9
3. Coding information
4. Find the most coded problem
5. Back to forum search keywords relating to problem
6. Find detailed comments
7. Put into research finding
The search function on forum is very convenient, as it is used by forum users to search for relevant information needed. You can search a particular keyword of a problem to find relevant topics, and you can narrow down range to one or multi sub forums.
For example: The battery issue seems to be frequently mentioned in topics. I start to investigate. By selecting Troubleshooting sub forum and searched about battery. 14 pages of results came up with 30 pages per page, which are 420 topics and thousands of replies.
Reflection 5
As gathering data from forum, I noticed there is a large disproportion number of view against the number of reply. This would relate to what types of users are on the forum.
As a function on forum you can search for member details, after researching, I found out that.
The forum consists of several types of users with different rights
• 37678 total members
• 36023 newbies
• 1898 Jr. Member
• 4 Legends
• 8 Global Moderators
• 7 Full members
• 5 extreme members
• 5 administrators
The members differs into 4 types,
Tourists:
This type of member is the majority as you can see 36023 members are newbies which mean these members only post one to couple of topics just to get the answer he wants, he does not have much social engagement with other forum members.
Minglers:
This type of member is minority as they are interested in the social ties between users and exchange ideas. They can be a mix of some forum moderators and Jr. members.
Here is an example of communication between Jr. Member and moderator in private messaging.
Devotees:
This type of user normally post almost of the topics in How to… section, they have the expertise and experience to share professional work and knowledge to people. These members are normally posting updates of software, resources and tutorials, but they have less interacting with other members.
Insiders:
This type of user is a combination of mingler and devotees; they have a strong social tie with the forum and they are active topic writer and resource provider. These members are administrators, moderator and some Jr. members.
Here is some more details about these 4 types of users:
“Tourists” lack strong social ties and deep interest in the activity (they often post casual questions). “Minglers” have strong social ties but minimal interest in the consumption activity. “Devotees” have strong consumption interests, but few attachments to the online group. Finally, “insiders” have strong ties to the online group and to the consumption activity, and tend to be long-standing and frequently referenced members. For marketing research useful for marketing strategy formulation, the devotees and the insiders represent the most important data sources. (Kozinets 1999).
Reflection 6
As the research continues, I realise that many terminologies which need to be explained for the research results.
Here is a few of them:
Rom: Rom is the operating system which you can flash or install on device
Rooting: Gaining administrator rights to modify protected areas of operating system
ICS: Ice Cream Sandwich, code name for Android 4.0
Android: Open sourced operating system developed by Google to run on mobile devices
Kies: Software developed by Samsung for user to connect device to PC for synchronise information
Construction of classification system
When the data and pattern of messages are located, coding, analysis and interpretation of information need to be carried out, this involves find interest and extract elements from the source data.
The coding system developed during the research:
• Mentioning problem
• Experience sharing
• Confirm usage
• Product News and rumours
• Solution providing
• Exchange ideas
• Complaints
The coding system does have overlapping since topics can have multi codes.
Refection 7
After coding and analysing data, here we can answer the marketing questions for the research:
1. Where are they coming from?
There are from all over the world:
Here is some examples from the member list, location in not required in the registration form, so many members did not fill in this information.
Romania
Singapore
Kuwait
Singapore
Philippines
Malaysia
Hungary
Canada
Portugal
United States
United Kingdom
Sweden
Sri Lanka
2. What is the purpose of this community
People come to this community to share experience about Samsung Galaxy S product, exchange ideas, finding solutions to problems, share expertise, look for product information for future purchase, socialising with members with common interest
3. What topics are talked about
• Mentioning issues or problems users experienced
• Share good experience of product
• Confirm usage of product
• News regarding of product and future release of hardware and software
• Providing and sharing tips, solutions, information and resources about device
• Exchange experiences
• Complain about device
4. Identify different kind of participants
Identified in reflection 5
5. Identify popular issues with the product
As the research continues, there are a few major problems got many mentions and negative sentiment.
Battery life
Kies connection
Overheat after use
Crash or freeze
Memory card problem
GPS signal and software
Rom updates
Rooting system
6. Find the motivation of this community
The motivations behind this community are people with common interest. Also as the site’s top, right and button is sponsored by pay-per-click advertisement, this would be the main revenue from the site. On the top of navigation bar Ringtones and accessories are the link to e-commerce site for related products.
Reflection 8
Member checks
These reflections were posted on
http://www.samsunggalaxysforum.com for member checks and gathering feedbacks and correcting errors.
Recommendations
Getting the data from forum is a challenge since the amount of information provided is huge, and analysing by human is a tremendous job.
Automation software can be developed to speed up the process for gathering and sorting information.
The software can be used to recognize topics, auto coding, analysing and providing results. Lots of the information in human language variations is difficult to recognize by software, but it can categorize and reduce the amount of redundant information for human censorship.
The research of the certain research need to be familiar with the research subject and previous knowledge of the field could help with the research process.
