[00:00:00] Kayte: We think that people will answer our research questions from the bottom of their blessed heart, and they want to engage and participate with these brands that they love, and they want to provide feedback. But at the end of the day, people want compensation for their time versus what I'm doing on social media is just engaging in a conversation. I'm not asking them to go off platform. I'm not asking them to go from swiping into like a click out link into a different platform or a different survey, or remove them from their engagement time on social media. We're just intercepting them right where they are, getting a high caliber response for a couple of

[00:01:03] Seb: You're listening to the Insightful Connections podcast. Our guest today is Kayte Hamilton. Kayte is the founder of The Social Question. Founded in 2022, The Social Question is a social media research agency that helps insights teams connect with social media insights through influencer collaborations. Unlike others in the social media insight space, The Social Question works directly with social media users and influencers for authentic engagements right in their platform. This allows research teams to engage with whole new types of respondents that may not be in traditional panels or databases. Kayte started off in the qualitative space as a moderator, dabbled in quantitative and sales before taking the plunge into social media research. Kayte, thanks for being on the show today.

[00:01:42] Kayte: Thank you so much for having me. Anytime I can chat up The Social Question, I will take up that opportunity.

[00:01:49] Seb: I love it. So the first question that I have for you is, zooming out a little bit from The Social Question, I'm wondering if you can tell me a little bit about how you originally found yourself in market research and how does that sort of origin story account for where you are today?

[00:02:04] Kayte: Yeah, so the super long story is I thought I would have a career wearing a white lab coat as a pharmacist, but I will give you the TLDR version and that is more about my master's program in advertising. I quickly learned that I did not want to be the voice of the customer. I wanted to hear from the customer specifically. And there's a little bit of irony in that just given the fact that I wear hearing aids and hearing things firsthand and being the primary point of connection has always been really important to me. I discovered in my advertising program that most agencies were not actually conducting research. Either the brand was producing the research or the brand was hiring a market research firm. And at the time, I didn't even know there was a market research ecosystem. So undergrad did not prepare me that this was a viable career option that there was even an industry around. The sexier, louder, older sister of marketing and advertising tend to get all of the radio time, all of the teaching time, all of the program and degree time. And I'm actually coming full circle now and I teach at my undergrad program specifically marketing research to kind of open everybody's eyes that there's a whole other industry that's available if you're not into marketing, if you're not into advertising or if you're more into the data side. So that like shorter condensed version is that I kind of found it by accident, which I think is a very typical story within market research. But I started in qualitative doing training as a moderator. I've always had hearing loss. It was something that I was born with, but early on in my career, it was less of an issue. If you ever have a podcast on a focus group, snafus, lots of hearing aid related stories that I could share with you. But as my hearing loss slowly progressed, which was expected, I moved a little bit into the quant space. I tried some things in sales. I tried something in app development because being a moderator in a large group prior to the Zoom era with live closed captionings, which I'm actually using for the session right now, I just didn't have a place as a qualitative researcher long term because of my disability. And I ultimately needed to find something, carve my own path, make my own seat at the table, which is what I have found with the social question.

[00:04:31] Seb: I love how that story sort of really nicely sets up what you're up to now with the social question. You and I talked about the social question and what you guys are up to. And one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the podcast was it just sounded so unique and so out of the box. So for listeners who maybe haven't had any exposure to the social question, what are you guys up to? Like what makes you guys different?

[00:04:53] Kayte: I think the easiest way to answer that is actually explaining what we don't do before getting into what we do do. So we do not have a panel of influencers. We do not do social listening or social intelligence. So we are not scraping public comments on a reel or a post or any kind of like feed material. Instead, what we're doing is actually partnering directly with influencers and creators, specifically on Instagram, that's our primary playground. And we're actually leveraging those creators and the communities that they have built in natural dialogue. And we have them host research questions on our behalf. So we contract with influencers. This is not something right now that is a database of every social conversation that's happening. It's not the brand watch for qualitative research. It is completely unique. It's its own class of social media research. I work really well with other social intelligence tools. I also play really nicely with traditional qual and quant by just adding this like third form of the social media data into the conversation.

[00:06:07] Seb: You know, you mentioned those partnerships you do with influencers to conduct research. What does one of those look like in practice if you were to unpack it?

[00:06:16] Kayte: Yeah, so if you are familiar with Instagram, Instagram has a feature called Instagram Stories, which is essentially like a 24-hour cycle of content. It is a additional step of engagement beyond just posting to their feed, posting a reel, posting a video kind of thing. Within Stories, there's a natural dialogue that's happening through things like polls or question posting where people, their followers, can literally text in a response of some kind to a question that's being posted. So we're using Instagram Stories as the medium or like the mode to data collection, and an influencer will hop on their Stories and be like, hey, we're partnering with Kayte from the social question today. We talk a lot about dog food as a community here, right? I just started changing my dog's diet or I just got a new dog. They promote a lot of dog-related content. Whatever the content overlap is, we always hype that up to explain the relevancy, explain the content connection for this collaboration. And then we have them post questions specifically in Instagram Stories. So we use those questions, we use those polls, and then I develop technology to download those responses. It comes as a shocking revelation to a lot of people that Instagram Stories does not allow influencers to download their replies or download their data off-platform. Even somebody with a million followers doesn't have that access. So when I had the idea for the social question back in like 2016, 2017, I knew that was one of like the biggest hurdles I was going to need to solve for because we can get people to ask questions. That's a proven, easy collaboration. We know influencer marketing has completely changed the game in terms of collaborations and brand contracts and those kinds of things. But if we can't access the data, that type of collaboration is meaningless. So that was the first thing I needed to solve before. So the output of hiring an influencer, having them ask questions is a CSV or Excel output of all of those replies or all of those responses. And then we use that to code into the research story. So it's kind of like focus group transcripts. It's kind of like a survey open-end output, but because it's starting and originating on social media, it's much more conversational. We get a lot more depth to the responses that people answer with, and we get a lot more storytelling from the social media users, right? Like how often do we see an open-end on a survey with like two or three words or like a fake answer or people putting in gibberish or just not answering the topic at all? We don't have that problem with these social media collaborations because these social media users feel like their influencer is a friend or somebody that they're close to or somebody they have a parasocial relationship with. We're not seeing people answer these survey questions on social media with a bunch of fake data. It's super high quality. I probably have to scrub out less than 1% of the data, and that's usually because they just didn't answer the question. They wanted to share a personal anecdote or a personal story outside of the content because they feel that's the only way they can get in front of the influencer's eyes or time of day, or they'll bring up like a topic from something else, but they still engage meaningfully. We just sometimes have to tease those parts out. But it's a completely new form of data that we're trying to scale.

[00:10:00] Seb: So that's really interesting. So it sounds like the way that you guys are operating is you'll partner with an influencer to ask a question, and then instead of necessarily incentivizing respondents, it's that actual desire to talk to the influencer that's driving the content. Am I right there?

[00:10:18] Kayte: It's actually getting to the true intent, I feel like, of market research. I think the last 15 years, going from qual to quant in sales or whatnot, we think that people will answer our research data questions from the bottom of their blessed heart, and they want to engage and participate with these brands that they love, and they want to provide feedback. But at the end of the day, people want compensation for their time versus what I'm doing on social media is just engaging in a conversation. I'm not asking them to go off platform. I'm not asking them to go from swiping into a click-out link, into a different platform or a different survey, or remove them from their engagement time on social media. We're just intercepting them right where they are, getting a high-caliber response for a couple of questions. These questions, I need to stress, are very high strategic questions, right? So it's not going to substitute what you're doing in traditional research. It's not gonna substitute what you're learning in social listening, but it's gonna add more color. It's going to add more big-picture perspective. So we see a lot of people using this type of methodology, either before traditional research or after traditional research, because there's a gap in their understanding. They either need something to help them focus, or they need something to help them fill in the missing blanks of questions that they didn't get out of the interviews.

[00:11:44] Seb: I wanna dive in on that idea a little bit that it sort of sits along traditional research. It can't necessarily replace some of the things that traditional research does. What are some of the limitations of the approach that allow it to sort of sit alongside maybe qualitative or quantitative research, but not necessarily take the place of it?

[00:12:03] Kayte: Yeah, you're not gonna have a screener. You're not gonna be able to cross-tab the data into male or female or age or where somebody lives or their geographic codes or things like that. It's truly as gen-pop data could possibly be. We might get somebody from France answer the survey. We might get somebody from Canada respond to the questions, but we are looking for partners who have high US audiences or who have high gender or sex audiences or within a specific age range so that we can target it in that way. But we have to think of it as being big picture data. It doesn't fit neatly into like nice little pristine bubbles or sterile bubbles that tend to happen in market research. It's taking much more of a marketing approach to data or an advertising KPI approach to data than it is through the hyper-selective nuanced information. I do get some pushback sometimes on the lack of screener mentality. So people who don't work with influencers who do not engage much with social media think that the influencers are telling their followers what to say or how to answer or influencing the data in a negative way. I can kind of see those connections for somebody who's not familiar with social media and just overusing the word influence in that context. But I actually argue that it's more objective. There's less bias going into the conversation when compared to traditional qual and quant. You have to qualify to participate versus we know they qualify for this topic or for this industry type purchase or let's just say it's a makeup type context. I just finished something in the personal care space. They're going to this influencer because they're looking for makeup tips or like a specific look or a specific type of foundation or color care or something like that. They are the buyer market. Whether they make the right amount of income or in the exact age range, have children at home or things like that doesn't really matter when you're looking at more strategy questions versus tit for tat business answers that you're looking for.

[00:14:19] Seb: Thinking about this through my lens as a recruiter, I can see how in some ways that whole sort of concern about research fraud or sample quality is kind of sidestepped because the fact that there is no incentive really and the incentive, if it makes sense to use that term, is just talking to this influencer that's in an interest area. I mean, if you're not actually engaged with the category, what are you doing? It's not like you're getting $5 out of it or whatever.

[00:14:45] Kayte: I would just want to clarify just slightly on the incentive piece. We do offer just some giveaway or sweet sticks for people who participate. We're usually giving away like a $50 e-gift card or like $50 cash. But out of the thousands of participants, we're going to be doing a random entry drawing. So it's kind of like a nice charity on top element to the engagement versus we're going to get way more people who participate potentially because of that natural dialogue. Now, that natural dialogue part is really hard to categorize might be the right word because Instagram, since that's the main playground that we're on, does not offer a conversational score for the influencers, right? Like we know how many followers they have. Sometimes we can use some other software to determine what the engagement rates they might have on different types of activities, but there's not a conversation score. So before I partner with somebody, I'm actually digitally stalking them myself. So are they on stories? Are they asking questions? What kind of like a video dialogue have they already curated? Because at the end of the day, the people that I partner with would moonlight or maybe potentially daylight really well as qualitative moderators. They have a community of people. They know how to keep them engaged. There's two-way conversation. They're offering something in exchange for their time. Usually that's entertainment, but sometimes that's a special coupons or access to new products or things that they might be interested in or introducing them to new information. The type of influencer that I partner with is literally a moderator and every sense of the research word, they just don't know that. I can't tell them that they're a moderator. It's vocabulary that doesn't mean anything to them, but just coming from the qualitative space, there's so many natural great conversationalists that exist on the platforms and that's the type of person that I'm looking for. So it's not just somebody who shares a lot about dog food, but they're also talking a lot about dog food and engaging in that two-way dialogue and have those kinds of expected relationships because there's nothing worse than partnering with a creator who doesn't do that type of engagement strategy. And then when I come in to partner with them, it's just a random question drop and it comes out of left field, it doesn't come across as authentic. And so not all creators are created equally and that's something that I have to usually educate my partners on, my research partners on because they think that they can just cherry pick an influencer who has 500,000 followers because they have such a high amount of community. That means we're gonna get this amount of turnover and as many people to respond. But if asking questions is not part of that engagement, it can actually tank and it wouldn't be as strong. It's a very intuitive perspective when I go to actually contract an outreach and like work with an influencer because I'm looking for that level of dialogue already existing within their community.

[00:17:53] Seb: What do you think is the most important thing you've learned since starting the social question?

[00:17:57] Kayte: How isolated the market research industry is. We are a very close-knit group. We know very strongly or very in-depthly about whatever our discipline is, whether that's qual or quant, but we rarely go outside our tried and true protected data streams. And I think that it's going to be a really big challenge just as society grows, as social media becomes even more a part of our everyday lives. Most researchers don't engage with social intelligence, which is shocking to me, not just because I'm a millennial and I've grown up with social media, but there's so much conversation happening outside of our sterile conversation environments that we really need to be braiding all of the information together. This was something that I spotted when I first started right after grad school. I realized qual and quant kind of had their backs to each other and were not playing nicely. There was not a lot of data sharing, not a lot of information being passed back and forth. It was kind of like an isolated projects happening kind of like one step after the other. And I constantly pushed back on like why those two things weren't like holding hands, why they were more like opposite magnets. And the more that I had dove into social media data, I'm just also wondering why that's not part of the conversation. I think people just get so used to the package deal that comes with traditional research that they just feel uncomfortable with new data streams. And so most of my partners transparently are very bold researchers. They are not as risk averse. They are open to experimentation and learning about new forms of connection because whether it's qual or quant, you have to connect with that research participant or connect with that respondent in order to get quality data. We're also seeing in the industry, right, a lot of conversations about data quality, whether that sample quality or the data itself, there's the whole idea. I listen a lot to Tom Rich, who shares about like garbage in, garbage out, research design methodologies. And obviously some of the things that we're doing over and over and over again are not working. And so we need these new explorations and these new data types. So starting my own company is really what opened my eyes to how closed minded market research really is when it feels like it should be the opposite, but we are very much stuck in our way sometimes.

[00:20:36] Seb: So Kayte, you mentioned your progressive hearing loss a little bit earlier. I wanted to dive into how that's affected your journey and insights and what relationship that's also had to you starting the social question.

[00:20:48] Kayte: I think my hearing loss, while it's obviously part of my identity, it's not my whole personality. It's something that I've literally always had. I was the first female in my family to be born with hearing loss. I got my first set of hearing aids when I was 14. I progressively knew that my role in the research industry would end up changing because I wouldn't be able to host focus groups anymore. Being in large groups or like large conversations and just the audio is an issue. At the same time, I think there's a lot of rich data available and text forms of communication. Part of that is me obviously being a millennial myself, but what we're seeing on social media specifically with new ways to talk to people, that's not a text message, not an email, that's not an inbox, that's not a survey response, that's not a research platform, like open-end essay type answer. There's just such an authentic way to communicate. There's a lot of emotion that comes through in social media dialogue. There's a lot of rich detail. There's a lot of emoji use that sometimes I'm having to discern different sarcasm or jokey emojis like with what they said or people using shorthand or jokes. I have to say up to speed a lot on like the Gen Z lingo so it's not Gen Z who will text in acronyms. I'm proud of being able to find a position within the market research community that's leveraging my disability as an asset, but that's also a form of data research that's accessible to so many more people, just the nature of using social media. And so it's really like a perfect recipe to bake your favorite cake. Instead of it being a perfect storm, I try to look at it a little bit more positively that I had to create something new, but most of my research teams that I work with and most of the influencers that I work with as well are really encouraging of it. And then before we pop off of this particular conversation, I also want to mention that I actually named my company The Social Question, not just because of social media, but because I really enjoy leaning into more social conversation topics. So it's really fun to work on makeup studies. It's really fun to work on protein. It's really fun to work on, you know, kind of like easy to access conversations, but it's also more meaningful when I get the chance to connect with patient communities or social advocacy teams or people with disabilities or people that are part of like nonconforming groups of society. So leaning into that social element of society is really powerful. And I can kind of lean into my disability as my own set of credibility when I'm working with those types of audiences and within those types of communities. And it's allowed me to embrace my disability, I think much more than I would have in a traditional research role where it's always kind of seen as an excuse or a way that I need accommodations versus now it's a strength that I can leverage.

[00:23:53] Seb: Hey, last question for you here. What keeps you motivated?

[00:23:57] Kayte: Bringing fresh perspectives to the industry. I am surprisingly not main character energy. I do not need to be front and center and be a core thought leader and be a keynote speaker and like lead the charge on new things. But I'm really, really passionate to open people's eyes to new ways to collaborate and integrate with each other. I also learn a lot from influencer conferences. So I go to influencer events and influencer shows and I see a very similar parallel world to market researchers and the engagements that we have and trying to get new contracts and new partnerships and new sources of revenue and influencers and creators. If we were to take a page from their book, there's so much more opportunity to just expand our ways of thinking, expand our ways of connection beyond just these influencer collaborations that I'm working on. There's just so much more fresh perspectives that are out there. And I think that really is what drives me is I want to educate more and more and more market researchers that it doesn't have to be just one way to insight. It doesn't have to be just one way to data collection. So I want people to get uncomfortable. I want them to stretch their bubbles a little bit, which is just very ironic because it's not my personality usually, but it's become something that I've embraced.

[00:25:30] Seb: Kayte, thanks so much for being on the show today. Folks want to know more about the social question. Where should they go?

[00:25:34] Kayte: There's a couple ways. One obviously is Instagram since that's our primary playground. So I have both a personal page and a social question page. The social one is at the underscore social queue. And then I am always busy over on LinkedIn. So my personal Kayte Hamilton LinkedIn page, I'm probably on LinkedIn four to five hours a day between like five minutes here, 10 minutes there, beginning of the day, end of the day. You can almost always catch me on LinkedIn the most quickly, but other social media or email is also available too.

[00:26:06] Seb: Well, thanks so much for being on the show, Kayte.

[00:26:08] Kayte: Thanks for having me.

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