What’s Trending on #MRX? Jeffery Henning’s #MRX Top 10 – July 11, 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.

Here are the top 10 most retweeted stories shared on the Twitter #MRX community in the past two weeks.

1. Are surveys a thing of the past? – Ray Poynter recently led a brainstorming session on the future of market research. He wrote, “When the conversation concentrated on the next five years it was clear that traditional research concepts, such as surveys and focus groups are going to play an ever decreasing role in market research, even in the context of mobile surveys and community discussions. The key changes are going to be in the integration of data sources…I will leave my comments here with one prediction. At the moment something like 50% of market research relates to surveys, focus groups, communities, discussions, polls, and other traditional forms of market research. In five years this will be under 25%.” I look at this not as a decline of surveys but as a rise of alternative methods; the analogy I use is that of The Survey Superpower in a Multi-Polar World.
2. The Research Club at Insight 2011 – Derek Watkinson shares photos from the Insight Show in London at the end of June. Not a survey in sight.
3. Join the dots to see the full insight picture – This is not to be confused with Lenny’s excellent interview with the company Join the Dots! Writing in MarketingWeek, Michael Barnett discusses the evolution of insights departments away from an emphasis on survey projects to instead synthesizing results from many types of data.  “When people take notice of market research, it is usually the result of a big consumer survey that delivers an attention-grabbing top-line result. But the headline results usually belie a meticulous process of gleaning insight from customer data from many sources over a long period of time.”
4. The perils of DIY research – Brian Singh offers an example of a DIY survey done poorly, with a matrix question where respondents could pick each item on a frequency scale for each row (“I read the print magazine ‘Always’, ‘Often’, ‘Occasionally’ and ‘Never’”!). The good news for the poor survey author is that most respondents will answer this question in the spirit with which it was intended and, with a bit of data cleaning, they should be able to use the most of the rest of the responses.
5. Why I think surveys are better on mobile phones than on PCs – Ole Andresen of ConfirmIt offers “a contemplation in three parts” (Part I, Part II and Part III) on his personal experiences with taking surveys on mobile devices, where he finds the user experience to be far better than on personal computers.
6. Guideline on Research via Mobile Phone – With mobile phones becoming a primary communication mode across the globe, ESOMAR released an updated version of its guideline on conducting research with respondents via mobile phones. The guideline specifically applies to research done through voice or text message.
7. Market Research About Tablets, iPads and Smart Phones Shows High Adoption Rates – The QuestionPro Blog laid out a roundup of all of the latest statistics on these three devices. For example: 12% of today’s online population currently owns or uses a tablet, and another 11% plan to purchase one in the next 12 months.
8. Introduction to MR, an ever-changing map – Blogging from ESOMAR’s RW Connect, Betty Adamou used a Prezi infographic to illustrate “how big our industry is and how closely we are related to marketing agencies and communications companies”.
9. Snapshot of the Marketing Research Industry – NetBase charted the online conversations for the top MR industry associations, and Tom HC Anderson kicked-off a lengthy online discussion about what the findings mean for the industry and for social media research.
10. Should Marketers be concerned about Consumer Happiness? – Luminosity Marketing sums up recent studies around consumers’ discretionary spending, happiness, and the recession’s effect on family bonds. Compared to 2008, just as many consumers today plan to curtail discretionary spending, and overall consumer happiness remains steady as well.

Phew! That’s quite a reading list. Thanks to all of the #MRX-ers who’ve tweeted these links and many more! Want your favorite link to show up here? Just tag it with #MRX in Twitter and see if enough people retweet it.