Social Media in Market Research

Ray is the author of The Handbook of Mobile Market Research, The Handbook of Online
and Social Media Research and the #IPASOCIALWORKS Guide to Measuring Not
Counting, the founder of NewMR.org, editor of the ESOMAR book Answers to
Contemporary Market Research Questions, a content author for the University of
Georgia’s Principles of Market Research course and is the Managing Director of
The Future Place, a UK-based consultancy, specialising in training.Ray
has spent the last 35 years at the intersection of innovation, technology, and
market research, during which time Ray has held director level positions with
Vision Critical, Virtual Surveys, The Research Business, Millward Brown,
Sandpiper and IntelliQuest.

Ray sees his mission as “Have fun, help people, pursue knowledge, and try to make some money along the way”

Gaelle has been a practitioner and an advocate of social media in research since 2010, continuously promoting its use and sharing best practice.

Gaelle started delivering insights using social data and online communities while working for Intrepid in 2009.

Gaelle led Kantar Media’s social media insight team from 2012 to 2020, developing its social intelligence proposition from the ground-up, creating a consumer-centric research capability based on social data, emulating many traditional research techniques.

During this time, Gaelle worked with a multitude of clients including Barclays (Project Shortlisted for the AMEC Awards 2014) and Orange on projects presented at the MR Summit (2014) and Esomar Fusion (2018), demonstrating the value of social intelligence within these organisations and driving mindset shifts.

Since moving client side in 2020,  Gaelle has continued to advocate the use of the social data and communities as a source of insights and demonstrate the value of these techniques as part of the research toolkit.

Gaelle has also contributed to thinking on the topic of social media in research with a paper entitled “Social Media Research: developing a trust metric in the social age” published in the IJMR (2013) and was part of the cohort which developed the thinking around the IPA’s Measuring Not Counting initiative (2015).

Gaelle was named among the Social Intelligence Insider’s Top 50 in 2022.

Gaelle is a frequent speaker at events and conferences including for NewMR, the Social Intelligence Lab, MRS and IIEX.