What’s Trending on #MRX? Jeffery Henning’s #MRX Top 10 – August 19, 2012

By Jeffrey Henning

Here are 10 of the most retweeted of the 1,623 unique URLs shared on the Twitter #MRX community in the past two weeks.

1. 2012 award nominations now open – IIR and Anderson Analytics are calling for nominations for the 2012 NGMR and EXPLOR Awards, with winners to be announced in November at The Marketing Research Event in Boca Raton.
2. Can MR clients recognise quality when they see it? – Edward Appleton provides six tips for suppliers seeking to convey the value of higher-priced market research services.
3. Time to mobilise your fieldforce – Research magazine asked Steven Hughes of Cint, Will Ulstein of SPA Future Thinking, Gregg Peterson of Market Strategies and Elaine Coleman of Bovitz to weigh the challenges and benefits of embracing mobile research.
4. The next big small thing in fieldwork – Writing for Research, Joe Fernandez discusses examples of mobile projects from Best Buy, BSkyB, SC Johnson and Sony, and interviews researchers from a number of agencies on the current role of mobile research.
5. Of creativity and insights – Lakshmipathy Bhat of DRAFTFCB+ULKA Advertising contemplates the business value of consumer insights, using John Drake’s definition as a springboard: “An insight is a penetrating observation about consumer behavior that can be applied to unlock growth.”
6. Will this sloppy, boring, error-ridden market research report do? – Todd Haylon of Research Rockstar recaps “Will This Do” and the ensuing discussion of report quality on Research-live.
7. Research-industry hiring sputters – Karen Morgan discusses research hiring with Marc Dresner of IIR: many companies have pulled recently opened positions, while others aren’t hiring replacements for departing staff. With fewer open positions, hirers often have inflated expectations for whom they want to fill their open reqs.
8. Is Latin America going to lead the research revolution? – Lenny Murphy argues that Latin American researchers “are likely to lead the charge in embracing new approaches and technologies. That may seem like a counter-intuitive argument when one considers that face-to-face is still a major method in many of these regions, but necessity is the mother of invention and no amount of inertia on the part of researchers will stop the explosive and transformational impact of mobile and social media in those countries.”
9. Marketing is dead – Bill Lee, writing for the Harvard Business Review blog network, argues that traditional marketing is dead, because buyers aren’t paying attention, CEOs distrust CMOs, and social media swamps traditional media.
10. Census chief: Online survey will cut cost of 2020 headcount – Haya El Nasser interviews Census director Robert Groves for USA Today. “[This is] the neatest time in my lifetime [for social researchers]. The challenge in going forward lies in the wise use of existing resources. What we’re doing now will be viewed as another era in 15 years.” Upcoming changes include conducting the American Community Survey at least in part online in 2013, the 2020 Census in part online, and revising the race and ethnicity questions.