Jeffrey Hennings’s #MRX Top Ten – The Want Button: Client-side Tweeters, Quality Surveys & Researcher/Consultants Wanted

By Jeffrey Henning

Of the 1,500 unique links shared on #MRX last week, here are 10 of the most retweeted.

1. Client-side voices from the world of #MRX – This month, the Research/Dollywagon review of leading influencers on Twitter expands to include the Top 9 client-side researchers. #MRX needs more client researchers tweeting!
2. New Facebook ‘want’ button – reports – At last year’s ESOMAR 3D Digital Dimensions conference, when Sean Bruich of Facebook discussed whether the firm would add a “Dislike” button or rating scale to complement its “Like” button, he said the firm would prefer simpler approaches. Could he have been thinking of the new Facebook “Want” button, added to the Facebook JavaScript SDK? Also see: ‘Wants’ and needs: Researchers debate Facebook’s new button.
3. Evaluating Survey Quality – Dana Stanley of Research Access interviews Mark Blumenthal (“Mystery Pollster”) of the Huffington Post about the challenges in evaluating how representative a particular poll may be.
4. What sort of skill set do researchers need to be considered consultants? – Edward Appleton proposes seven skills that market researchers need if they want to move from being reporters of data to valued consultants.
5. 6 Ways Social Media is Revolutionizing Marketing Research – Andrew Somosi of NM Incite discusses the need for social media research to look beyond brand monitoring to “derive deep, unexpected consumer insights about unmet needs and alternate uses for products”.
6. That’s Me, The New Editor-In-Chief of MRIA’s Vue Magazine – Annie Pettit of Conversition will now also be the new editor-in-chief of Vue magazine, the official publication of the MRIA, the Canadian MR trade organization.
7. Why research has to change to be of real use to the creative industry – Douglas Dunn of Tuned In Research has been blogging sessions from Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity for Research. Why is he at Cannes Lions? “It is clear that research – or ‘[effing] research’ as it was referred to more than once on stage – is still perceived as the enemy of the creative industry.”
8. Proving social media success is all about analytics – Richard Beattie of Vitrue reviews some of the social media statistics currently available for brands and concludes with four types of more comprehensive analysis that may represent the future of social analytics.
9. How to use Google Insights as a research tool [PDF] –Ray Poynter of Vision Critical discusses how researchers can use Google Insights for Search, which reports on the volume of Google search terms by date and location, as a proxy for interest in brands and topics.
10. No, Virginia, there are no insights – Annie Pettit of Conversition takes issue with the research industry’s obsession with the term insights, arguing that insights are rare and not essential to good research.

Important Note: The U.S. market research industry will be subject to honoring a Do Not Call Registry for the first time. Howard Fienberg has the details and is looking for feedback from the industry to guide the MRA’s consultation with regulators.