What’s Trending on #MRX? Jeffery Henning’s #MRX Top 10 – November 28, 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 1,118 unique links shared on #MRX last week, here are the top 10 most retweeted (after counting no more than one tweet per company):

1. Six degrees of separation? On Facebook it’s just 4.74 – Robert Bain of Research contrasts a study showing how the average Facebook user can be connected to another in as few as 4.74 links with Milgram’s classic research from the 1960s that inspired the “six degrees of separation” meme.
2. Are online panels finished? – One of my favorite features of Research magazine is the monthly Head-to-Head debate series. In this edition, Pulse Group’s Bob Chua and uSamp’s Gregg Lavin take on the question of the future of online panels.
3. Ingrained in the brain – Nick Southgate identifies five areas where he believes behavioral economics will have a lasting impact on the practice of market research: framing questions, seeking to understand respondents’ beliefs about others’ beliefs, researching the non-decisions of cognitive misers, using experiments and developing ways to change consumer behavior.
4. Behavioural economics for breakfast – Helen Nuki of research agency Monkey See describes the results of applying a behavioral economics framework to analyzing ethnographic data from use of the cereal Weetabix.
5. Behavioural economics in the pub – Orlando Wood of BrainJuicer describes the results of a mass ethnographic exercise designed to understand binge drinking.
6. The Future of Market Research Communities – 5 Trends to Watch in 2012 – Ushering in prediction season, Job Muscroft of the research agency Face says MROCs in 2012 will become central information hubs, will host more strategic co-creation, will integrate the social-media data streams of participants, will offer rich access through mobile devices and will integrate more automated analysis.
7. Are Market Research Clients Respected? – Edward Appleton, European Customer Insights Manager at Avery Dennison, wants research agencies to help research departments within clients be more successful, rather than imagine possible futures where research departments shrink or even vanish.
8. How Not to Get Market Research Clients – Dana Stanley, now with Survey Analytics, transcribes a Radio NewMR interview in which Tiffany McNeil, the Strategy & Insights Manager at Del Monte Foods, shares her thoughts on research suppliers and innovation.
9. Rosencrantz And Brandenstern Are Dead – “Consider the consumer, and the walk-on role brands play in their life,” Tom Ewing writes. “A story of a consumer’s life from a brand’s point of view would – like Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead – be a rather strange one. A string of disconnected occasions, the occasional mention, a number of decision points … and in the end – perhaps – a lonely and unmourned delisting.”
10. Normification v Gamification; or; What Can We Learn From The Klout Backlash? – Tom Ewing hits the top ten twice, with his second post using changes at Klout to highlight a perennial problem for any researcher running a tracking study or maintaining a normative database: the paradox of how improvement invalidates past norms and makes the entire methodology seem less reliable.