Week 6: The Chaos Continues

A social media marketer lost his job and went to work on a farm.

He worked hard, but had one weird quirk: every morning, he would do a belly flop into the hog trough. After a few days, the farmer had enough.

“You city folks sure are strange,” the farmer said. “Why are you always floppin’ headfirst into the pig slop?”

“Sorry, force of habit,” the social media marketer replied. “I’m trying to make an impression in your feed.”

Anyway, this week’s title was mostly a joke. There’s not actually all that much chaos. Sorry to disappoint…

Are you done yet?

Interviewing? No. I still have to get two more businesses. It should be done pretty soon, though – probably by next week.

Compiling all my data is contingent on me finishing my interviews, so it’ll take a bit longer too, but I’m nearly done inputting all of the data that I have so far.

Inputting where?

Good question. Since I’m mostly working with qualitative data, I’m using a technique called coding, which is essentially just sorting for keywords.

To code, I’ll split my interview notes up into individual ‘lines’ that represent each concept I discussed with my interviewees and put each of those on different rows in the spreadsheet. I’ll then extract keywords from the interviews and write them down in the ‘Code’ column.

Once I’ve added all the information, I can count the frequency of certain keywords as well as how often different variations of each keyword (i.e. spending (yes) vs spending (no)) show up. This will give me a better/more accurate idea of what trends actually exist in the data, rather than me just guesstimating/eyeballing it.

I’m also collecting whatever quantitative data I can. For example, for some of the businesses, I know the exact amount they spend on marketing, so I want to compare businesses that spend less/more and their keywords. Also, all of the businesses I interviewed use Instagram, so I’ll compare their follower counts on the platform to this other information. (It’ll make more sense when I do it.)

What’s it look like?

This.

This is just a snapshot of a few rows – the complete sheet stretches over 200.

I should be completely done with my logging (including all interviews, all coding, what qualitative data I can collect and division by industry) by next week, at which point I’ll be able to update on what exactly I’ll be doing to build my solution.

🫡

~Maya