What’s Trending on #MRX? Jeffery Henning’s #MRX Top 10 – October 3, 2011

By Jeffrey Henning & Tamara Barber

There’s now ample opportunity to stay on top of what the market research community is saying in the Twitter-sphere. In addition to our weekly coverage on the top #MRX tweets of the week on the Innovation Evolved blog, we’ll be doing a top-ten recap every two weeks right here on GreenBook.

Of the 1,503 unique links shared by the Twitter #MRX community the past two weeks, here are the Top 10 most retweeted. This edition was dominated by news from the ESOMAR Annual Congress, the annual gathering of ESOMAR members from around the world:

1. Failing to Sell Yourself – In Research Live’s blog covering the ESOMAR Congress, Robert Bain summarized the comments from research heads at Volkswagen, General Mills, Procter & Gamble and Reckitt Benckiser, who articulated a strong desire for agencies to evolve the product of market research. Joan Lewis of P&G remarked: “We need to not become the case study of the industry in disruption that didn’t notice it. We need to become the case study of the industry in disruption that drove it to a greater place.”
2. The Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) Vendor Landscape Evaluated – Roxanna Strohmenger and Andrew McKinnes have each completed separate Forrester Wave™ reports on EFM vendors: Roxanna profiled firms of interest to market research professionals, Confirmit, Globalpark, IBM SPSS, Vision Critical and Vovici; and Andrew has profiled firms of interest to customer experience professionals: Allegiance, Empathica, MarketTools, Medallia, Mindshare Technologies and Satmetrix Systems. No doubt all 11 firms will argue they should be in both lists!
3. More than a Game – Jon Puleston of GMI and Deborah Sleep of Engage Research have contributed the most important Research On Research study of the year: improving the quality of feedback to online surveys by using games as inspiration. It’s a must read, and won the best methodology paper at the ESOMAR Congress.
4. 5 Reasons So Many Market Research Pros Suck at Marketing Themselves – Dana Stanley observes, “It’s ironic, isn’t it? We’re advising others on marketing strategy and tactics; our advice is used to formulate email campaigns, website copy, online and offline advertisements and more.  Yet our own marketing is often no better, and in some cases is even worse, than that of many other industries.” He has five reasons why marketing researchers downplay marketing.
5. Coca-Cola Research Boss Bets On Passive Listening Over Response, Social Media Over Surveys – Marc Dresner writes, “Stan Sthanunathan [Coca-Cola’s global head of marketing strategy and insights] believes market research—both as a profession and as an industry—may be on a collision course of potentially Titanic proportions with an iceberg called change, and he’s urging all hands on deck to help turn the ship around.”
6. Five Things Every Researcher Needs to Know about QR Codes – Dan Bot (a real person, not a bot!) writes, “Pushing QR codes out to consumers is one thing, but using QR codes to pull insights back from consumers is a totally different animal.” (For a contrarian take, see QR Codes: CueCat 2.0.)
7. ESOMAR Congress Day 1 – ESOMAR’s own RW Connect blog provided highlights from each day of the Congress. Professor Richard Wiseman’s keynote on perception and reality was a thought-provoking start to the event, offering three takeaways from examples in applied psychology: When looking at a picture for the first time, people (including survey respondents) only focus on the part of the image that is most important to us, not the whole thing. People are not accurate predictors of behaviors, especially when they cannot anticipate the actual context around the behavior. And, in general, people are not very skilled at separating lies and the truth in interviews.
8. ESOMAR to Survey Industry Use of Cookies and Tracking Technology – ESOMAR is asking market researchers to provide information on how they use online tracking methods. As the online privacy debate continues across multiple industries, ESOMAR hopes to leverage this data with lawmakers to differentiate market research uses from other marketing uses.
9. Brain Scans and Beer Ads – Rounding out our ESOMAR-related news, Robert Bain reported on Heineken’s integration of new and old techniques in its ad research. EEG, skin conductivity measurement, and eye-tracking gave researchers a play-by-play read on how consumers reacted to an ad as they watched it; then more traditional qualitative interviews were used to understand the ‘why’ behind the findings. As a result of this research, the beer company nixed the ad.
10. Some Best Practices In Building and Managing “Research Communities” – Tom De Ruyck of InSites Consulting writes that market research online communities are best used as a qualitative tool, and they should be limited to no more than 150 participants so moderators can build proper relationships. Commenting on the need for market researchers to be able to integrate multiple methodologies, De Ruyck says that researchers should think of themselves as DJ’s who “have the guts to experiment without forgetting tradition: they re-use old riffs and blend it with contemporary elements.”

You don’t have to wait for GreenBook to wrap up the top ten stories; you can find out what’s happening on Twitter at any time: http://twitter.com/search/%23MRX gives you views of both top tweets as well as the entire stream of tweets tagged #MRX.