What’s Trending on #MRX? Jeffery Henning’s #MRX Top 10 – March 5, 2012

By Jeffrey Henning & Tamara Barber of Affinnova

Here are the Top 10 stories shared on the Twitter #MRX community the past two weeks.

1. Analysis of a Hashtag: What Twitter Means for Market Research – Ben Leet of uSamp reflects on his own recent angry tweet about a train voyage, and what it might mean for social media market research in general.
2. Twitter opens the vaults to MR through Datasift deal – Such research gets a boost as  Datasift. has licensed a two-year archive of public tweets to Datasift. James Verrinder of Research reports that Datasift will make this data available for market research to major brands through its Historics application.
3. Is a silent, black & white movie the strongest Oscars favourite ever? – Can social media predict the Oscars? Francesco D’Orazio of Face recaps the social media analysis that led him to correctly predict that “The Artist” would win Best Picture.
4. The Global View – Gamification: An Option Or A Requirement? – Adriana Rocha of eCGlobal Solutions argues that supporting gamification is not an option when it comes to surveying Generation Y and Generation Z consumers.
5. How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did – Kashmir Hill of Forbes takes on the perils of data mining, as Target applied predictive analytics to purchases, identifying those that signaled the early stages of pregnancy. Thanks in part to the backlash from one angry father, Target now hides the extent of its knowledge when targeting individual consumers.
6. An Open Question to Young Researchers – Finn Raben of Esomar has a call for feedback from young researchers on their views towards ethical and behavioral guidelines.
7. Pinterest as Free Market Research – Grant McCracken of MIT discusses his experimenting with Pinterest and its implications for researchers.
8. 15 tips for getting the most out of focus groups – Lynnette Leathers of Mindspot provides 15 suggestions for maximizing the return from your next focus group.
9. Empowering the Young & Old in MROCs – Anouk Willems of Insites Consulting discusses the challenges of running research online communities for participants age 16 to 24 year olds and for participants age 50 and above.
10. Finally, rounding out the Top 10, Tom Ewing of BrainJuicer shares the following image, asking, “Image problem? What image problem? Found on Getty Images for ‘market researcher’ ;)”