What’s Trending on #MRX? Jeffery Henning’s #MRX Top 10 – May 24, 2017

Of the 3,064 unique links shared on the Twitter #MRX hashtag over the past two weeks, here are 10 of the most retweeted…

1. Data Science Through the Lens of Research Design – Dr. Elan Sasson of Data Science Group discusses a framework for designing research projects. “Whether you implement XGBoost, random forests, HMMs, CNNs or RNNs…, if you are not addressing the concise business problem and its operationalization, you are essentially pushing water uphill with a rake.”
2. The Evolution of Happiness: An Introduction to Happiness – Freya Vinten at Join the Dots discusses seven key drivers of happiness – Security, Health, Positive emotions, Engagement, Achievement, Relationships, and Meaning – and what they mean for Brits in 2017.
3. Top 10 Market Research Blogs 2017 – The team at Voxpopme compiled a list of the top-ten research blogs.
4. We’re Not from the Stone Age: A Baby Boomer Responds to a Millennial’s ‘Brutal Truths’ – Isabelle Albanese of Consumer Truth rebuts Nicholas Cole’s article “The 11 brutal truths every Baby Boomer needs to hear about Millennials” and fondly recalls what life was like before electricity and sliced bread.
5. Moderators: 4 Tips for Improving Your Craft – Brittany Stalsburg uses her extensive experience with focus groups to provide four keys to being a good moderator: “Establish a rapport; Don’t judge; Work the room; Check with the backroom.”
6. Open Data, What Does It Mean and Why Do We Need It? – Will Poynter at CLOSER Discovery opens up about open data and its potential benefits and pitfalls.
7. Lightspeed Pushes Mobile First Approach – To speed the industry’s evolution to mobile surveys, Lightspeed is offering a promotion to companies that create short, mobile-friendly surveys.
8. Cheap, Fast, & Easy – Michalis Michael of Digital MR predicts how market research will change in the near future.
9. The ICC/ESOMAR Code – ICC and ESOMAR have updated their international code on market, opinion, and social research.
10. Customers Prefer Bots Over Customer Service Agents for Simple Tasks – LivePerson conducted a global survey to understand consumers’ opinion on automated customer service tools compared with live human beings. “In a scenario where a bot is just as accurate as a human customer care agent, 55% of consumers said they would prefer to chat to a bot over a human.”

Note: This list is ordered by the relative measure of each link’s influence in the first week it debuted in the weekly Top 5. A link’s influence is a tally of the influence of each Twitter user who shared the link and tagged it #MRX, ignoring retweets from closely related accounts. The following links are excluded: links promoting RTs for prizes, links promoting events in the next week, pages not in English, and links outside of the research industry (sorry, Bollywood).