What’s Trending on #MRX? Jeffery Henning’s #MRX Top 10 – July 25, 2011

By Jeffrey Henning & Tamara Barber

1. GreenBook Research Industry Trends Survey – Summer 2011 – The semiannual GreenBook Research Industry Trends Survey is underway, looking for feedback from research professionals who play a role in a role in deciding or evaluating methods, techniques, suppliers or resources for research projects. The survey only takes about 10 minutes and gives you a chance to sound in on trends the pundits regularly sound off on.  Are their claims “widely exaggerated” or “on the mark”? Have your say!
2. ESOMAR Publishes Social Media Research Guideline – ESOMAR has published research guidelines for SMR, governed by the principles that “underpin its existing guidelines on passive observation in public places,” which I think is a great analogy. The guidelines were developed in conjunction with CASRO. (Full disclosure: I served on the CASRO committee, primarily contributing research into the attitudes of consumers towards social media market research.)
3. Wake Up! You Need To Be Thinking About Mobile Market Research Now – Roxana Strohmenger of Forrester, who recently moderated the mobile debate Mobile Research: Great Hope or False Dawn, sounds a call to arms on why MR needs to be paying attention. “Is all of this talk warranted? Yes! Just take a look at some of these facts. Forrester forecasts that by 2014, 65% of the world’s population will own at least one active mobile phone. And, earlier this year, Mary Meeker of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers stated that we have globally reached an inflection point in Q4 2010―the global shipments of smartphones and tablets surpassed the global shipments of desktop and notebook PCs.”
4. Don’t pay to take surveys, ESOMAR warns respondents – Two companies in India require panelists to pay to become members, which is in violation of most market research groups’ codes of conduct.
5. Will Switzerland Ban PowerPoint? – Is this news or satire? You decide: “There is a new political force is Swiss politics, or at least a new political party. Called the Anti-Power Point Party, or APPP for short, the new party hopes to ‘decrease the number of boring presentations worldwide.’”
6. Putting Together the Pieces of Your Market Research Team – Cheri Tabel of The Pert Group discusses three key needs when assembling a team of market researchers: curiosity, mastery of details and the right command of art and science.
7. Emotional Research is About More than Just Measurement – Writing in the June issue of Research magazine, Nick Coates of Promise Corporation notes the irony that many research analyses of emotion reduce it a number. Such analysis is quantitative, reductive and – yes – predictive of certain outcomes. But emotion is much more than that, and Nick argues that storytelling is a great qualitative technique for truly understanding our customers’ emotions. In yet another irony, his article leads off a new section of Research, “Measuring Emotion”.
8. A Paranoid Look at the Future of Social Networking – Tom H.C. Anderson reflects on the uncanny understanding that Google+ showed of his social network and worries about how all this knowledge of the social graph might be used against individuals in the future.
9. What is the Next Big Thing in Market Research? – Ray Poynter brings to a close his three-part series on the results of a workshop he moderated on the future of market research. What’s the next big opportunity? “To paraphrase the thinking, there are opportunities to make millions of dollars through approaches such as behavioural economics, netnography, research through gaming, and smartphone anthropology, and neuroscience. But, the Big Data opportunity is going to be measured in billions of dollars.” Big Data = big dollars. Also see Part I (Are Surveys a Thing of the Past?) and Part II (Is the Market Research SWOT mostly wrong?).
10. The Association for Survey Computing 2011 International Conference – Join me in Bristol in September at the ASC’s annual conference. It’s mandate? “Research needs to adapt for the future. The salt of research – the survey – is losing its flavour. As response rates decline and respondents get harder to reach, conventional approaches are losing their power to predict… At the same time, technology has allowed others to move into what researchers considered their exclusive domain. DIY surveys, Enterprise Feedback Management, data consolidators and the sheer abundance of information

And, in other news, congratulations to Greg Stock and the team at Vovici on being acquired by Verint! My personal reflections on the announcement: Vovici & Verint Sitting in a Tree.