What we’ve been through till now.

Mobile Reputations Collaborative Consumption, here is a sneak peek of our research.

In a class of our university, we’ve been told to choose a group of people and make a research about Mobile Reputations and Collaborative Consumption (or else Sharing Economy).

The Target Group

To begin with, we decided to make a research with people from marketing agencies, digital agencies and adveritising agencies. In that way, we could learn those fields better, through the mobile use of social media of those people. Later though, we decided to change our target group and focus in our department in university “Communication, Media & Culture”. Actually, as lots of people say, we are the new era of those fields, so we thought it was better to learn from ourselves. It was also easier, because we were with them everyday for lots of hours in classes, so we could observe them too and keep notes.

And that’s what we did. We have three orientations in our department, so we selected one student per orientation. Meaning, one from journalism (actually we take interview from 2 students from that orientation), one from adverising and public relations (the known AD&PRLab) and one from culture.

The Discussion Guide

We made a discussion guide with 10 questions in order to have a better, qualitative interview later.

The Pilot Interview

We did a pilot interview, too, just to secure that our discussion guide is working.

The Real Interviews

Then, we proceed to the real interviews. All of them was made by different ways. One was taken face-to-face, the other via Skype and the other via Facebook call.

• The interviews we did via Skype and Facebook call, were made that way, because they were very busy and had little free time in their schedule. They said us, that they were certainly not able to meet us face-to-face. After a little bit pushing, they agreed to do it that way. Therefore, they were the perfect interviewees.

The Mentoring

After that, in a discussion with our professor for our progress, we noticed that we’ve missed an important goal for our research. We did not focused so much on the mobile thing. What I want to say is that, the questions we asked, were some personal, a “just-to-know’ each other to make the interviewee feel comfortable, and then focusing in the term “Collaborative Consumption”. So, the mobile thing was missing.

• However, we came back and added four questions in the list and did the interviews again. As a result, they were completed and our research continued properly.

Coming to a cunclusion

As long as we finished the interviews, we started getting results. We tried to find similarities and differencies in their answers, in order to come to a conclusion. We took into consideration very carefully all the informations we gathered.

• We noticed that most of them did not know the term “Collaborative Consumption” or “Sharing Economy” otherwise. We had to explain them the term first, and then discuss about it. Only the student from AD&PRLab knew the term, as long as she worked on it in previous class. So, we can say that it is not widely known (yet) that term, however everyone seemed willing to learn more about it. As a matter of fact, some of them said that they would like to work on it in the future.

The Result

We gave the opportunity to our interviewees, to express their general opinion or to say something else. We received answers about the better use of social media, what is collaborative consumption in reality and if they want to work on it in the future. In general we achieved to take a look in the opinion of young people about social media and how they use them now and in the past.

It is important to say, that we have our articles posted on Medium, for all our research and it is easily accessible in the publication “Mobile Reputations Collaborative Consumption”.

Team Members:
John Argiris, Joanna Krioni, John Katsafados & Evi Sidiropoulou