Our opinions often tend to be influenced by society. Because of the influence society has on us, sometimes unobtrusive research could be the best way to retrieve real raw information without it being biased by an outside influence. Social media can be both a good and bad outlet to use for unobtrusive research purposes.
The positive? Social media is composed of websites such as Facebook and Twitter. These two sites in particular are outlets that people use to express themselves freely, in a more open way then they sometimes express themselves in person. In some cases, people's true personalities and opinions come out through their posts and comments on such sites. Because people feel so free to express their true thoughts and feelings without certain pressures one might face in person, this is a good place to observe people and conduct unobtrusive research. Facebook has broadened its use to incorporate supporting all different kinds of everyday activities or organizations that individuals might be a part of. Since Facebook is used by so many different organizations, it could be easier to do measurements of your research results involving a social media campaign where subjects do not even realize there action to "like" something is part of someone's research.
Over the course of my internship at GlobalGrind.com, I became really involved with developing a consistent social media department for the company. This huge project I took over began with one simple cause. At the beginning of my internship a tragedy happened in Detroit, and this resulted in the death of a little girl after police raided the house where she lived. The GlobalGrind.com website consistently brought to light issues of youth violence and unjust deaths. My boss asked me to make a Facebook page in honor of the little girl who was killed, and this page was to become a page dedicated not only to her death, but the deaths of other young people who's stories needed to be heard. The purpose of the page was to create greater awareness of these injustices. The Facebook page is titled She Has A Name: Aiyana Jones. After inviting people to join the cause, the page's fan numbers continued to grow and grow. Not only was I able to measure the success of my use of social media, but people who go to this page know that all a little over 13,000 people that "like" the page have in common the desire to bring justice to these types of cases. By taking a look a pages such as this one, you are able to uncover a little more background, or unobtrusive research, over the individuals, companies, or organizations which you are researching. In my internship, I went on to create multiple Facebook pages, which were each aimed at different audiences, however, each separate audience had in common certain things because of their common "like" of the fanpage.
The negative? Although social media sites allow one to feel more free to express themselves, these sites are not absent of pressure. One simple but great example of the pressures in the social media world are people's default picture. People often only like themselves being represented on social media sites at their very best. Take a look through a few of your friends Facebooks and notice that the majority of the time you are not finding too many very embarrassing pictures of them. This is in part due to the pressure to maintain some sort of standard as an individual on the social media scene. Pressures such as these can sometimes hinder the honesty of an individual when carrying out actions such as posting pictures, comments, or even the types of things they choose to "Like."
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