What’s Trending on #MRX? Jeffery Henning’s #MRX Top 10 – August 3, 2012

By Jeffrey Henning

Of the 1,759 unique URLs shared by the Twitter #MRX community over the past two weeks, here were the most retweeted.

1. Turns Out Apple Conducts Market Research After All – Steve Jobs’ antipathy towards market research for new product development is often exaggerated to imply that Apple has no interest in research. Now recent court filings in Apple vs. Samsung illustrate some of the customer satisfaction work done by the company recently.
2. Social Media Are Giving a Voice to Taste Buds – Stephanie Clifford of The New York Times shares examples of major food brands using social media to understand what new products to develop: from Frito-Lay’s pickled cucumber-flavored potato chips for the Serbian market to Sam Adams B’Austin Ale to cake lollipops at Walmart.
3. Final thoughts on MRMW – Reg Baker shares his four takeaways from Market Research in the Mobile World. And I’m going to start calling this next quote from him Reg’s Law! “Clients will buy cheap data over good data every time.”
4. Twitter chart toppers – Research magazine and Dollywagon present a newly expanded analysis of research influencers on Twitter, including more clients and more analytics specialists.
5. Britain 2012: Who do we think we are? – Ipsos Mori celebrates Britain’s hosting of the 2012 Olympics with a look at how British attitudes have changed since the last time the country hosted the Olympics (1948).
6. Research Innovation During Disruptive Change: 10 Key Takeaways From Market Research in the Mobile World – A few days on the beach gave Leonard Murphy clarity about the 10 most important conclusions from the MRMW conference. Two of my favorites: “New competitors are leading the new industry conversation” and “Clients want and expect suppliers to adapt.”
7. Market Research Skills of the Future – Dana Stanley of Research Access recaps part of an MRMW presentation by Blizzard Entertainment’s Jason Anderson. If “new competitors are leading the new industry conversation,” as Lenny Murphy argues, then you should follow Jason’s advice for recruiting the same people they are recruiting: engineers and statisticians, instead of MBAs.
8. Why I quit #MRX – Tom Ewing of BrainJuicer, a frequent contributor to the #MRX hashtag channel on Twitter since it started two years ago, shares six observations and some “anec-data” from his experiment with not posting to the hashtag for a month.
9. The names of the Games – Five sponsors of the London Olympics – Heineken, BT, Cisco, Lloyds TSB and EDF Energy – explain how they are using market research to understand the impact of their sponsorships.
10. Twitter unveils Political Index – James Verrinder of Research magazine discusses a Twitter tool to track sentiment towards the two major-party U.S. candidates for President.