The ICG has some of the most talented and experienced researchers in our industry and we are delighted to have them recognised in the MRS’s awards process. The MRS/ICG Award for Independent Consultants, now in its sixth year, is designed to recognise the contribution of researchers who choose to work as micro-businesses rather than in a larger agency environment.
Spotlight today is on our Finalist Matt Gibbs, Bayes Price.
Following The #Covid Conversation Using MR Tools
Bayes Price’s work on this project was inspired by the desire to promote our sector, develop new techniques, engage in peer-to-peer knowledge share, collaborate internationally, and try to make a positive contribution to society in general. They’ve been tracking the #Covid-19 conversation since a global pandemic was declared in Jan 2020, gathering 200 tweets every 5mins, for free, via Twitter’s API. At the time of writing they’ve amassed nearly 25 million lines of unstructured text (tweets); how on earth were they going to analyse all that?
Automated techniques, some new to MR, were deployed to provide a ‘forest-eye view’ of their Big Qual database. They appied Syuzhet Sentiment scores, the NRC Emotion Lexicon, Machine Learning tags, and tracked conversation sub-topics. They flowed data into existing MR tools, analysing and tabulating in a way only MR tools can! Outputs were connected to visualisations in Tableau and PPTX. To mark that point, that’s Twitter’s database ultimately flowing into offline PowerPoint documents.
Bayes Price are advocates for knowledge share, and have been blown away by the support for this endeavour. A real highlight was presenting “how you can too” sessions at the ICG webinar and first MRS Big Qual Summit. Session recordings are free to all.
In terms of insight distribution, their interactive visualisation is hosted on Tableau Public. Viewers can explore historical trends, latest 7 days, and even use a free text search to examine what interests them.
When it comes to impact, Bayes Price’s ‘client’ here was their collective profession. They hope this project will promote innovation and collaboration across our industry and empower peers to access, analyse, and visualise Big Qual databases using many skills they already have. They also hope it will emphasize that the BI-world has challenges, to which, MR’s tech & talent is a perfect fit, contribute to the world’s Covid insights, prove that collaboration can help ICG members punch way above our weight and, finally, inspire our peers to get involved in this ongoing project.
What Mattt loves about being an independent consultant and his membership of the ICG:
We believe that our industry plays a fundamentally important role in Society, that is, securing millions of people a seat, and a voice, at higher-powered decision making tables. Adding an element of democracy, not once every 4 or 5 years, but every single day. Because of this, we’re passionate about innovating, sharing knowledge, and promoting our industry. Being independent gives us absolute freedom to do that.
Our experience of being an ICG member has been be so positive that we’ve revisited our original growth strategies because of it. We don’t necessarily need to move towards a traditional in-house structure when, as ICG members, we can draw on such an incredible network of hands-on practitioners. The range of services, depth of skill, comaraderie,and commitment to innovation is, collectively, second to none. We don’t say that lightly. When it comes to optimisation via hard market forces, there is nowhere to hide as an independent. We know every single member is functioning at a highly competitive level and, therefore, we can have the confidence that they will deliver for us, just as we will deliver for them. ICGers are friendly people too!
We’re incredibly grateful and honoured to be included in a list of finalists that’s a fine example of the range and quality of the ICG membership! Yes, it’s a wonderful confidence booster for us. We also hope it will help us continue to promote these new methods, and encourage other micro-business to harness the power of international collaboration.
“Our experience of being an ICG member has been so positive that we’ve revisited our original growth strategies because of it….The range of services, depth of skill, comaraderie and commitment to innovation is, collectively, second to none”
