Posted by Vaughn Mordecai on Thu, Dec 15, 2011 @ 10:14 AM
Warning...this post has absolutely, totally and utterly, nothing to do with market research, social media research, or anything else research related or otherwise academic in any way. It's about time I throw out some random stuff for the sake of extinguishing the fire from my head that drives me to write...without having to somehow tie it to the mechanics of my business. This blog just happens to be my current forum for putting out the fire.
I had the awesome opportunity to take a bunch of 12-year old boy scouts to downtown Salt Lake last night. If you've never been to downtown Salt Lake during the holidays, it is certainly a site to behold. There are Christmas lights EVERYWHERE. A local LDS (Mormon) attraction called Temple Square has been lit with over a million lights for many years. The display is so extensive that the grounds crew begins setting up for this display starting in
August, and it takes them until March to bring everything back down. If you ever get a chance and you're in the area at night (5:30pm - 10:30pm) between the day after Thanksgiving, and January 1, it's well worth the visit. During the time the lights are up, hundreds of thousands of people visit the area. Don't let the crowds keep you from seeingthis amazing site.
Driving into work this morning, I made the realization that I've lived in the Salt Lake area for half of my life. I've mentioned before that I grew up in a rural city in Idaho, but I started out in Salt Lake and will probably end here as well. Many things have changed in the area, but much is still the same. My children went to the same zoo that I did. I take my family to see the lights, just like my parents did. The downtown buildings have had a facelift, but much is still the same. It really is home.
As my holiday gift to you, I thought I'd give you a quick list of tips and local places to visit when you come to my hometown. They are all within short driving distance of downtown Salt Lake (in some cases walking distance). I polled my staff (so there's the only mention to Market Research) and here's what the locals came up with (in no particular order):
(More content below the list)
Art's Related:
Food Related:
Museums & Gardens:
Nature:
Miscellaneous:
Shopping:
This is by no means a complete list, feel free to add your favorite spots in the comment block below...
Lastly, I want to challenge the readers of this blog to do something...a "call-to-action" in marketing terms. This isn't a call-to-action for me or my business, but for yourself personally, and the people around you. Regardless of your religious philosophy, whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, Denali, or Festivus...the holiday for the restuvus, it's time to step up.
On the way home from downtown Salt Lake, with these 8 boys in tow and three adult leaders, we stopped at a local fast food restaurant (12 & 13 year old boys are always STARVING). While we ate, we began to notice an old man, missing two fingers, slowly nursing a cup of coffee. As we were wrapping up, the man approached these young men and started asking them questions that they couldn't understand about chicken, playing pianos, the weather, and if they were missionaries. It was apparent that he was homeless, had nowhere to go, and was just trying to stay warm. One of our leaders offered to buy the man some food but he was too "out of sorts" to understand. He made kind of a scene in front of these young men, and then apologized to them for making a scene. The scouts didn't know how to react. As I was thinking about it this morning, I realized that, regardless of your current lot in life, there will ALWAYS be someone less fortunate than you. Here's the call to action...at this time of year...when we have so much to celebrate...find someone to give a little service to. It can be big or small, doesn't have to be monetary, could be a small little gesture, but find someone to help, even for an instance. I can guarantee you this; it will be a gift to both of you.
Best wishes and have a merry Christmas. Happy holidays and may you have a successful and wonderful 2012.
Vaughn
Posted by Vaughn Mordecai on Tue, Dec 06, 2011 @ 10:48 AM
The Southwest Chapter of the Marketing Research Association is sponsoring a free webinar for the market research industry. The webinar will be held on Wednesday, December 7 2011 at 11:00 am CST. Join us for this webinar that will be filled with interesting content on the qualitative research industry. Here are the details and descriptions:
As the online qualitative research space is expanding, market research professionals are learning to adapt to new mediums. This presentation will provide valuable tools for executing online qualitative research, immersive research techniques and adapting your qualitative research techniques for mobile research.
Title: Maximizing Your Online Immersive Research Toolbox
Speaker: Rachel Bell, Director of Customer Experience
Revelation, Inc.
Date: Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Time: 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM CST
Space is limited.
Reserve your Webinar seat now at:
https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/776281230
After registering you will receive a confirmation email containing more information about joining the Webinar.
Hope to "see" you there!
Posted by Vaughn Mordecai on Wed, Nov 30, 2011 @ 01:55 PM
My first job (not my first career job) but my first "actual job" as a young man was working for a farming corporation. I was fourteen years old and my best friend's dad had management responsibilities for a pea seed factory in rural Idaho. He was a farmer and a cowboy through and through and he knew how to work. And he taught it to the group of us that had the 
pleasure (and the pain) of working for him for an entire summer (some of us more than one summer).
Managing acres and acres of pea seed required a lot of maintenance. We had the important responsibility of roguing the pea fields (hundreds of acres of them - maybe even thousands of acres). Roguing is the agricultural process of weeding "rogue" plants out of fields to maintain high quality product. It's always about quality control isn't it?
It was a different era and the work was all done by hand. Here's how our day went. A group of us (all teenagers) would meet at a central location (within walking distance of our house) at 6:00am. We'd hop in the back of our boss's truck and ride about 15 miles to the location of the office and seed silo. From there, we'd organize and head to a local (or semi-local...1-2 hours away) pea field. On arrival, we'd jump out of the truck and begin. The goal, our entire mission, was to extract pea plants with purple flowers. We'd space ourselves about 30 yards away from each other and walk up and down the fields. When you'd see a purple flower, you'd pull out the plant down to its roots. When you'd reach the end of the field, you'd dump the plants you picked and start over...and over...and over. When the field was complete, you'd move to the next field. We became pretty dang good at identifying purple flowers and keeping up. We were constantly looking for the needle in the haystack. We must have seen millions (trillions) of pea plants each summer.
Social media research is a little like this process. Instead of looking for the one "bad seed" you are looking for the one "good seed" in a field of useless information. Often times, when we evaluate social media content, even using search processes to streamline the content, we start with hundreds of thousands of pieces of information that need to be filtered out for quality, evaluated, and analyzed for its content "worth" associated with the subject. It's a rather rigorous process that requires our analysts closely evaluate the content for value. As you get involved with social media research and social media monitoring/listening, I suggest you evaluate your platform for its ability to find the needles in the haystack, the "good seed" in the field of irrelevant information.
Discovery Research recently published a whitepaper that addresses the social media content associated with a number of large companies in the health care industry. The whitepaper illustrates what social media content is capable of given the right statistical techniques and quality control processes. In the process, we evaluated over 1,000 sites for content related to the industry. We ran across a lot of irrelevant content. We also identified some of the purple flowers of information. Though this whitepaper is specific to health care, the principles apply to other industries and business types. Feel free to download it, it's free and may give you some ideas of how social media content analysis may benefit you. Simply click on the button below:
It's important to understand the opinions of your customers and there are a handful of very effective ways to go about it. Social media research provides a very good look at these unsolicited opinions if you can identify the content that matters to your organization in the field of information that can be left alone or ignored...i.e. find the purple flowers in the sea of green.
Posted by Vaughn Mordecai on Thu, Nov 03, 2011 @ 01:40 PM
I was watching television the other night as I was headed to bed and one of the classic movies of ALL TIME came on...no, not Citizen Kane, not Gone with the Wind...but Teen Wolf. If you like teen movies, wolves, and basketball, this movie was made for you. It's the classic story of an awkward teen, going through puberty, and realizing that a young man can actually be a werewolf (sounds familiar right). It turns out that the side effect of becoming a werewolf is popularity, mad skills in basketball, increased coordination, and improved luck with the ladies (who knew?). I have to tell you that this movie had a significant impact on my life (go Team Jacob).
There's a scene in the movie where Michael J. Fox, aka "Scott", hops on the top of his friend's wolf van and sidewalk surfs down the street to the Beach Boys song "Surfin' USA". How cool right? I distinctly remember one summer when my brother, friend, and I spent many a night "Surfin'" on top of my father's van as a result of this movie. We'd drive through neighborhoods and try to knock each other off the roof with our '80's stereo blazing as loudly and as staticy as it would allow, typically not to a Beach Boy's song, but to Guns & Roses, Dead Milkmen, Jane's Addiction, or the Cult. In retrospect, it's simply amazing that we didn't break any bones. I did manage to dislodge my brother from the roof and almost ran over him one night. The '80's were a different time.
Our van-surfing hit an all-time high one summer day when we decided to use the van as a moving diving board. There was a canal near our house that we'd often swim in on hot days. We'd frequently tie a board to the street's safety rail, throw it in the water, jump in the canal, and "surf" for as long as we could stand up. This, the "summer of the van," we began jumping off the parked vehicle into the canal. After the van-diving board got old, we decided to drive the van down the street, stand on the top, and when we felt the timing was right, jump off 
the van into the canal. This was not without risk. To begin with, you had to jump far enough off the van that you cleared the safety rail on the side of the road. You never wanted to belly-flop as it could produce serious canal-rash. There was always floating debris in the water (trash, wood, trees, dead animals, etc.) that you did NOT want to land on. Finally, if your timing was off, you'd find yourself knee deep in muck on the side of the canal in the thistles and thorns with your shirt off. You'd pick embedded thorns out of your crevasses for weeks. As funny as it is to remember these summer days, I would NOT encourage you to take advantage of the moving diving board at home.
Social Media content is a little bit like our moving diving platform. People say the craziest things online and they are happy to post them for the world to see. My organization conducts a significant amount of social media research and you never know in advance what you're going to run across. There's a lot of debris online, but there's also a real opportunity to make a difference for your organization if you have a way to avoid the debris. To avoid challenges with your social media initiative, consider the following:
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Do your homework. Stake out the landscape in advance. Make sure that your social media insights or engagement provider has methods for cleaning out the debris and garbage that floats down the online canal every day. Online content has a significant amount of spam, advertising, and non-relevant data tagged to the subject you're evaluating. Make sure you can eliminate the debris.
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Know what you are trying to accomplish. Are you looking for a social media research platform (research insights) or a social media listening platform (engagement)? If you don't know what you want, figure it out in advance of procuring a provider of these services. If you don't have clear goals, your experience will be unsatisfactory and you may walk away with road-rash from the experience.
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Much like traditional research, when conducting social media research, have a research question in mind. Being succinct and exact in your research is always better than casting a wide net and hoping something useful is pulled in along with all of the other junk.
The internet is full of muck, thistles and thorns, garbage, AND some very refreshing, exciting, and exhilarating content along the way. If you don't have one already, it's important you establish a social media approach that addresses both marketing and research. Jump on in; it's not as scary as you'd think.
Posted by Vaughn Mordecai on Wed, Oct 05, 2011 @ 10:29 AM
I love to laugh and try to laugh often...occasionally at the expense of a stranger. My family (my wife, kids, and I) enjoy traveling and do it with some regularity. I feel like it makes my children more well-rounded human beings. We especially like to visit New York, and other large cities in the east. As westerners, the culture, the transportation, the population, are all VERY different than what my children are used to. Travel, for my family, is not without its challenges. I have, what some would consider, a BIG family. There are six of us (four children, my wife, and myself). We have many conversations with the people that we meet that surround our family size.
On a visit to Florida, we were in a business hotel riding up the elevator, together, to our rooms. Two gentlemen hopped on the elevator with us. They turned to my wife, who I must say is kind of a hottie (ha), and said hello. I'm not sure how they missed the other FIVE of us standing there, but they struck up a conversation. They asked what she was doing, she mentioned that she was vacationing with her family (she brought me and the children to their attention). One of the gentlemen said, "These are all YOURS?" To which my wife answered proudly that “yes” they were. He replied with "Heaven help you!" and quickly exited the elevator without another word.
In Utah, four children really aren’t out of the norm. As soon as we hit the Mississippi river and further east, you'd think we'd walked into Twilight Zone. I like to goof on it as often as I can. We frequently travel with my brother and his family. They also have four children who line up pretty closely in age to my own children, look very similar, and could be mistaken for siblings. On a trip to New York, I jumped in a cab with my wife, my sister-in-law, my daughter and my brother's daughter. The driver, recognizing that we weren't dressed entirely in dark clothing (it was probably my sandals with socks that gave it away) asked where we were from. We told him we were from Utah, to which he said "I know what goes on there". I introduced him to my two wives and my daughters. He made a comment about barely being able to meet the needs of his one wife, to which I said "I hear ya' brother. Try adding a second to the mix."
On a visit to downtown Philly with my family, my sister-in-law and her children (my brother was at work), we visited many historic buildings and homes, the liberty bell, etc. Tracking around with eight children in tow, two soccer-moms, and myself, I'd engage onlookers with one question, "Have you ever seen 'Big Love'?" The looks were priceless. Incidentally, I DO NOT have multiple wives, but there are an awful lot of misconceptions about people from Utah that are REALLY EASY to take advantage of for a good laugh.
My organization has been conducting a significant amount of social media research over the past year. We have a solution that is much evolved and provides insight into mounds...may I say hordes...of online information (There's My One Sales Shtick). At a recent event, one of the speakers, when talking about social media, stated that "Listening is the new asking." I'd
rephrase that as "Listening is the new listening. The order of asking the question has just changed."
Online content and search, business intelligence data, market research data, customer profiling, social networks, etc. have produced a very difficult situation that needs to be addressed in our industry. What do you do with too much data? Or, is there such a thing as "too much?" More and more, you're hearing this term "Big Data" from organizations that have so much data that they aren't sure what to do with it all. Wikipedia defines big data as, "a term applied to data sets whose size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time." I can see this issue emerging and evolving as our particular organization processes and analyzes online/social media content whose search delivers unstructured qualitative comments in the range of hundreds of thousands of pieces of information. And, as we dashboard this information combined with business intelligence data, traditional market research data, etc. the issue is further spotlighted.
So what's to be done...?
Many software solutions are emerging that allow you to evaluate “Big Data” sources and dashboard their results. Unfortunately, with a few exceptions, they seem to be very complicated (probably because many of them are still open-source or based on an open-source foundation). I’d prognosticate that you’ll likely see a growing software trend in this area…SOON. “Big Data” is not getting any smaller.
Data is only good if you have the ability to answer questions and provide insights from it. You can have the biggest data set in the world, a data set in the petabyte range, but if you can't process it, if it doesn’t represent…something, and you can't gather answers from it, it's of little use to you. Much like my statement above, "Listening is the new listening," "Insight is the new insight". The days of collecting or gathering data, simply for the sake of having access to the data, are coming to an end (whether the source is a survey, an internal customer database, from a social media research source or other type of market research or business intelligence practice). If you can't provide insights, and resulting business solutions that are based on these Big Data sets, then the question should be asked as to why you’re accumulating the data in the first place. As my wife’s elevator suitor said “Heaven help you.”
Posted by Vaughn Mordecai on Wed, Aug 03, 2011 @ 02:34 PM
I learned a new word today. The word is donnée and refers to the core elements of a story, your assumptions on life that make you what you are, your basic facts, the premise of a story, the "what-if" that drives you. I'm hoping that if I use the word donnée often enough today, it will become part of my vernacular. I love words. That's most likely part of my donnée.
The other day, I realized that another part of my donnée is that I'm just a tad bit
prissy...at least according to my wife...not that there's anything wrong with that. My biggest fear, the thing that startles the H - E - Double Hockey Sticks out of me, is not public speaking (Glossophobia), it's not Geniophobia (the fear of chins), it's not Albuminurophobia (the fear of kidney disease), or even Xanthophobia (the fear of the color yellow). I'm a muriphobiac, or brutally afraid of mice. Yes...mice. I like to blame my parents for it. When I see a mouse, my very first reaction is to scream like a school-girl, jump on the nearest chair, and then attempt to stomp the thing into a bloody mess.
I love to be outdoors. I enjoy hiking, used to love mountain biking (too old & lazy now), and spend half my life on soccer fields. There's nothing more soothing than sitting outdoors in the mountains and kicking back. The outdoors, however, are not conducive for mouse avoidance. My wife and I recently saw the Sound of Music on an outdoor stage at the Sundance Resort (the mountain resort in Utah owned by Robert Redford). It was an awesome experience sitting outdoors watching the play and hanging with my wife...with the exception of the guy next to me that wouldn't stop singing at the top of his lungs...Cuckoo...Cuckoo...and an attack by a killer chipmunk, lizard-mouse the size of an oversized rat that attacked me (insert jump & scream & stomp in the middle of the play, followed by hysterical laughter by my wife who saw nothing). Yea...I'm a little prissy for a man who's six feet tall and comes from a blue collar background.
Park City, UT is one of my favorite places on earth. It's the perfect blend of being outdoors, not having to camp, great restaurants, outdoor activities, shopping, and mouse avoidance. The 2011 SWMRA Educational Forum was held in Park City, UT this year and the setting was awesome. The Canyons Resort, where the conference was held, is the perfect place for an intimate educational event, relaxation in the cool climate, and the perfect place to take in the outdoors with its views of the mountains and it's skiing trails, the gondola in the background and all the granolas walking around...who actually bathed.
One measure of an industry networking event is the food and beverage. It's great to catch up with your marketing research friends and associates. It's even better to meet new people, and find new clients, but if the food and beverages stink, there's too little food or too little to drink, or the food is gross; the networking function becomes a miserable failure. Survey said...GOOD FOOD (I don't drink so I can't comment on the beverages.) Although...I'm not so sure what I thought of the caviar covered cucumbers. Well...yes I do know what I think...YOU'RE EATING FISH OVARIES! BLECH! STOP THE MADNESS! I realize that many people like caviar, but just to educate the public...caviar is fish roe. Let's connect the dots...fish roe is defined on Wikipedia: Roe or hard roe is the fully ripe internal ovaries or egg masses of fish. Do you really want to eat that? I'd say that you DO NOT. Some would argue this was the best item on the menu; I enjoyed the other food items very much.
Another measure of conference success is the quality of the educational content. For me, I'd give the content 3 out of 4 stars (sorry, just being honest).
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Vaughn Mordecai, of Discovery Research Group, spoke to us on the "Secret Sauce" behind social media research. He was charming, funny, good-looking, fed us treats, entertained us, provided us with all the information we would ever want to know about social media research, told us how to set up social media solutions for our organizations, wasn't too analyticy but was analyticy enough, and was the perfect key-note speaker. He did swimmingly. ACTUALLY, this is me so I shouldn't probably comment on how well I did and how effective I presented the material. I hoped the attendees learned something and that it helped their companies. I think it did. The presentation can be found on Slideshare at this link: http://www.slideshare.net/DiscoRes/swmra-ef-2011.
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Bob Goodwin, the Marketing Research Director from Lifetime Products, spoke on his wealth of experience conducting and analyzing, data generated for a company that may not have been "traditionally" thought of as a market research driven organization. Have you ever heard an interesting speaker who actually spent some time talking about Conjoints? No...I hadn't either until I attended this session. Though I'm associated with an organization that conducts mostly quantitative research, I found his qualitative research stories particularly interesting...especially those that "encouraged" (forced) his vendors to build facilities to fit and test Lifetime Product sheds inside their focus group facilities.
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I am PRC Certified through the Marketing Research Association. I've endured more "legal credits" than I'd ever hope for. Taking nothing away from these presenters, but how often is this information compelling, engaging, and in many cases...in the least bit interesting. Most times, the content presented is about as interesting as watching facial hair grow. Until...In walked Helen Christakos, an Intellectual Property Attorney from Greenberg Traurig. I can honestly say that her presentation was one of the most interesting I've witnessed in our industry. Yes, it was filled with the "sky is falling" analogies, and the "you will get sued if you do this" threats, along with the "government will fine you" warnings. But, I did walk away with useful information for my business, that could be applied to my organization and it was interesting in the process. Cha-Ching.
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Do you know Ted? Ted Talks. TED stands for Technology Entertainment and Design, and according to Wikipedia, hosts a "global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, formed to disseminate 'ideas worth spreading.'" In 2005, TED began posting all of their talks online for free, and these guys (and girls) are brilliant. This session contained three Ted Talks and was good conceptually, but, for me fell flat on execution. I'd rather listen to someone at the front of a room who might not be quite as innovative (maybe even a little dumb) that I can ask questions of, than watch a video from a genius who wasn't in the room. Unfortunately, others seemed to feel somewhat similarly as the attendance at this session was a little bit lower than the other three (although it could have been because it was the last session of the day and folks were leaving to catch flights.) I did come away with some very good websites from these talks but the format left me wanting more.
All in all, the educational content was good. I walked away knowing about four new websites that I've enjoyed looking at (see Squareup.com; CrowdCompass.com; Gapminder.org; and the music website that may kill all other music websites - Spotify.com). I connected with some industry friends, met some new people, and didn't see any mice. All I could ask for from a couple of workdays.
Posted by Vaughn Mordecai on Thu, Jun 30, 2011 @ 10:32 AM
How many times have you heard the word innovation recently? And how many times has it been specifically associated with our market research industry? I'm assuming A LOT. Innovation is one of those business buzz-words that you love to hate. The word "innovation" came into use many years ago, in the year 1540, and we've been trying to keep up with it since. The word innovation comes from the Latin innovatus, which when broken down means "innovare - to renew or change" "in - into" "novus - new" or "to renew or change into new".
Max Planck, a Nobel Prize winner in physics in 1918 once stated, "An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: What does happen is that the opponents gradually die out." Where do you fall on this spectrum? Are you a "converter" or are you "dying out"? Hopefully you're a converter.
The market research industry is often considered slow moving when it comes to embracing new technology, change, and innovation. We hold on to our beliefs, our philosophy, our research methods, as we do our favorite pair of jeans. They're familiar and comfortable. But, what happens when that “change into new” comes along? Do we embrace it, improve on it, or ignore it? Mary Engelbreit, an illustrator of children's books said simply "If you don't like something change it; if you can't change it, change the way you think about it." If you’re a hater of change, change the way you think about it.
All the recent background noise surrounding market research innovation made me wonder about the true game-changers. Here are some revolutionary (or evolutionary) market research concepts that you will want to have an opinion on because they could really affect your organization or the research you conduct.
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Neuromarketing & Eye Tracking: Medical Sociologists talk about the
medicalization of human interaction. These research modes are prime examples of how market researchers are biologizing their processes by measuring brainwave activity and eye movements when presented with marketing, branding, or product stimuli. If the medical sociologists are right, now that Neuromarketing and Eye Tracking have been introduced into the market research space, you’ll see an increase in their use because the general public, and even we as researchers, typically buy in to physiological response data more so than data surrounding what respondents report (physiological vs. sociological).
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Social Media Research: There is an abundance of social media data out there. Market Researchers are now using it to measure consumer opinion, satisfaction, sentiment, etc. Social Media Research does more than listen. Market researchers are combining this data with other methods of research to give a very qualitative and quantitative view of consumer opinion.
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Mobile Research: Within the next few years, more people will have internet access over their mobile devices than have access to the internet through stationary devices. This will have an impact on the way we conduct market research, whether it's using the telephone functionality, internet, applications, or other communication features of the mobile device, market research collection methods will change. Are you prepared for the impact?
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Privacy, DNC, CAN-SPAM, and Other Legal Requirements: Legal requirements related to privacy, the Do Not Call, recording of phone calls, storage of data, emailing respondents, etc. are very specific and have significant fines associated with any violation. Make sure that you and those working with you understand your legal responsibilities. Just because you don't know what the law is, doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Have you ever been cited for speeding when you didn't know the speed limit?
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Online Qualitative Research or Online Communities: Qualitative research is one of the most significant areas of industry evolution. MROC's, Online focus groups, video streaming, high def web cam's, etc. have all reduced the geography and made qualitative research more easily executed and accessible. What happened to your mother's or your grandmother's focus group facility? It's about to change...if it hasn't already.
W. Edwards Deming an American statistician, working closely with top management in the US and Japan in the 1950's said, "It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory." Consider the research innovation going on in our industry. At the least, know about it and how it affects your business decisions and how it should drive the business solutions you offer.
If you're interested in how Discovery Research Group addresses these innovations in Market Research (with the exception of Neuromarketing & Eye Tracking because I'm still not sure how to approach it or what to think of it), feel free to contact us.
Posted by Vaughn Mordecai on Thu, Apr 21, 2011 @ 10:14 AM
About a year ago, I wrote an article titled "Social Media Market Research Methods are REALLY Unevolved." It's time to update that article because things have changed...dramatically...over the past year. Oh what a difference a year can make in evolutionary business cycles. The original article I wrote had a few basic premises.
- The way that market researchers view the market research process is often VERY DIFFERENT than the way non-industry folks view market research. Oftentimes market research, for most people, is simply "looking stuff up" on the internet.
- Social media research followed those lines. Even for many in our own research industry "looking stuff up" on social media sites was viewed as the social media research process.
- Few established research tools, research processes, or best practices were available to conduct social media research when this original article was written.
- Most researchers didn't understand the social media research process or what it even meant.
A year later, after a million conference sessions on social media research, some advancement in technology and proprietary platforms that streamline the RESEARCH process, and significant thought into how all this data could be analyzed in useful ways that answer business questions and provide business insights, the picture is becoming much clearer.
Toward the end of 2010, the MRA division IMRO produced a detailed best practices article that outlined social media research. The article, titled "MRA/IMRO Guide to the Top 16 Social Media Research Questions," really helped make this method accessible to researchers in a way that allowed them to execute social media research solutions for their own organizations and more importantly for their clients. Since then, other research organizations have also begun to put together social media best practices documents, suggesting that the method is here to stay.
There's pretty strong evidence that social media research will be a significant growth area for our industry. Yesterday, The Green Book, in conjunction with too many other partners to mention, released their annual Research Industry Trends report for 2011. There are MANY useful pieces of information included in the report, but one particular piece really hit home. They report that 28% of the respondents surveyed have used "Social Media Analytics." In addition, there's a gap between the users of the research and the actual researchers who provide the research (44% of Research Buyers/Clients have used Social Media Analytics, while only 24% of Research Suppliers/Providers have). This is really a call to arms for our industry. If we don't provide the Social Media Research solutions, others that are outside of our industry will. When asked what research techniques these respondents project for the future, 68% of Research Buyers/Clients reported Social Media Analytics while 45% of the Suppliers/Providers reported the same. It's time for us as Research Suppliers to get on board.
Social media research methods have evolved and have evolved quickly
into a very viable research-based process. Much like other evolved market research methods, it is no longer sufficient to simply "look stuff up" and call it social media research.
When I was a teen, I used to jump off a railroad bridge into the Snake River in Eastern Idaho. The Snake River was deep, dark, and full of under-currents. The bridge was high and took a climb to get to the top. When you'd make the jump, you'd almost always wear shoes because when you'd hit the water, bare feet hurt. The entire process was SCARY...but exhilarating. Many hot summer days were spent jumping from that bridge (it's illegal to do it now - it's been a lot of years) to cool off, show off, and goof off. There was a lot of satisfaction in that scary experience. It's time to make a similar plunge into social media research. Even though it might be scary, it will be worth it.
- Any thoughts on how social media research has evolved over the past year?
- Any suggestions for readers that are implementing social media research solutions?
Posted by Vaughn Mordecai on Fri, Apr 01, 2011 @ 08:00 AM
Market research products and methods of collection fall in and out of favor. Those of us in the market research industry that are constantly trying to stay ahead of the market research technology curve spend significant amounts of time tracking where the next trend is headed. As a close "watcher" of these trends, and as a NGMR Top Blog, we feel a moral and ethical responsibility to notify the readers about the next market research trend we see coming.
We all know that many methods of collecting market research data have renaissances. Market Research started as a face-to-face or door-to-door interviewing process. It evolved into mall research and then fell out of favor for a while. In the last couple of years, in-person market research has seen a staggering resurgence in the form of ethnography and online interviews completed on mobile devices using in-person interviewing techniques. Face-to-face operations are really gaining their second wind and seeing great success.
Along those lines, it's important that we announce the next multi-modal research resurgence. Announcing...Drum Roll Please...The Party Line Telephone Social Media Research Multi-Modal Co-Creation Data Gathering Methodology (PLTSMRMMCCDGM for short).
Is PLTSMRMMCCDGM a party? Is PLTSMRMMCCDGM a telephone line? Is PLTSMRMMCCDGM social media research? Yes & Yes & Yes
? Is PLTSMRMMCCDGM actual research, what about a data gathering technique? The answer is also a resounding YES!
The old regime of market researchers, the good ol' boy market research network, has decided that enough is enough and have started looking to the future in an attempt to compete. They've realized that it's time to blend these newfangled market research techniques with an opportunity they missed a long time ago, the telephone party line. Party lines are "single telephone circuits connecting two or more telephone subscribers with the exchange" and allow for multiple people on one telephone call simultaneously, without the need for a conference call or a bridge line. They've come to the conclusion that it's time to merge party lines with this new collaborative method of co-creation and social media...and if you're not on board, you'd better watch out. Here's how it will be executed:
- A telephone interviewer will call a household and recruit a respondent to participate in an equipment installation and a longitudinal study used to measure products and services, television viewing, customer satisfaction, advertising awareness, brand messaging and recognition, legal matters, CPG, online newspapers, regular ol' newspapers, usability testing, healthcare experiences, healthcare product development, whether your doctor is a jerk, whether your neighbor is a jerk, whether the garbage collector is timely on your garbage pickup, whether you are a democrat, whether you recycle and are "green enough", whether you believe your local political candidate is a pot smoking junky, etc.
- Once recruited, the participant will be asked to then recruit all of his/her friends and neighbors to eliminate their current landline and replace it with a new and improved party line (it is a party...but will certainly be the death of the landline telephone), thus establishing a MRPLC (Market Research Party Line Community).
- A technician will go to the neighborhood, eliminate all of the fiber telecommunication lines, replace them with party line telephone technology, and while onsite will set each household up with PL Phones (IP is so old-school) .
- On completion, the telephone interviewer will dial the party line and conduct a series of open-ended questions that will be recorded for text analytic purposes. All participants will speak at once or be encouraged to talk as much and as loud as they can. They'll feed off each other, be as opinionated as possible, argue, fight, laugh, cry, hurt each other's feelings, forgive, forget, contribute content, and co-create. The entire recorded conversation will be converted to unstructured written text using the speech-to-text technology promoted and developed specifically for market research purposes by "good ol' boy" market research companies all belonging to CASRO.
- The researcher will use this text analytic software and social media research practices to analyze the PLTSMRMMCCDGM data, report on the sentiment, produce 1400 word clouds, use insights to tell a story that will be converted to a gaming application for mobile devices allowing them to analyze more data through gaming research theory. And, if possible apply Net Promoter Score, conjoint analysis, and discrete choice modeling along the way.
- At which time, the entire thing will be placed on a dashboard that will be updated real-time, and will also include video streaming capabilities that have been built in to the PL Phones, along with GPS, for ongoing observation of the entire group. All exportable to Power Point.
- The entire process will be repeated any time a project is sold, and the respondents will be happy to participate because they can talk to each other for free on their P
L Phones without charging minutes to their cell phones and without having to pay fees to a local telephone company.
That's the way I see it...now prepare as you will...and by the way...have an awesome April Fool's Day!
Posted by Vaughn Mordecai on Thu, Mar 17, 2011 @ 01:31 PM
It's St. Patrick's day. The Irish-Catholic holiday that encourages the entire Christian influenced world to wear green, drink green beer (or at least Irish
beer), eat green eggs and ham or corn beef and cabbage (green pancakes if your wife, girlfriend, mom, significant other likes you), pinch each other (for those that like to be pinched and refuse to wear green), and listen to Flogging Molly.
I woke up today to my son dressed like a Leprechaun. It was startling. He wasn't embarrassed at all...I was mortified that he'd go to school looking like that. His class was having a contest to see who could wear the most green and he was intent on winning. "I don't get embarrassed dad," when asked if he wouldn't at least bring something to change into. I hope he wins. I can't imagine another child dressed in more green. I find it scary.
I'm a Welshman who doesn't feel particularly comfortable wearing much green (I'm colorblind) and I don't really see much excitement in the holiday. It hasn't always been that way. As a child I enjoyed it, it must have been the build-up from my school and my parents. We used to attempt to trap the Leprechaun that turned our milk green. We'd set up bear-type traps all over the house in an attempt to catch him/her and take the gold (they weren't real bear traps, but homemade inventions with relatively little risk...I did catch my mom once). We'd wake up to green milk, green pancakes (my mom liked me), and we were sure to wear green clothing (put it on the night before...it kind of hurts to be pinched by your brother). When I woke up this morning, I wondered about the source of the holiday and learned a few things about it. Here are a handful of interesting facts about St. Patrick's Day:
- St. Patrick's favorite color was actually blue.
- The earliest written account of St. Patrick's Day celebrations is found in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. It mentions celebrations in London in 1713 where Parliament took holiday on the day and all of the public buildings had green decorations.
- The first St. Patrick's day parade wasn't held in Ireland, it was actually held in Boston, MA in 1737.
- The consumption of Guinness beer more than doubles on St. Patrick's day from about 5 million pints to about 13 million pints.
- There are actually more Irish-Americans (36.5 Million) than there are Irish (6 Million).
- The world record for number of leafs on a clover is 14. That's one lucky clover.
The Marketing Research Association's Southwest, Southern California, and Northwest Chapters hold an annual conference in Las Vegas. Coincidentally, it's called the Las Vegas Conference and it's been going on for 25 years. On this the day of luck, for those of you who weren't lucky enough to attend the 2011 Las Vegas Conference, here are a few things I learned:
- Social Media Research will not likely ever replace traditional market research, but it does provide a way to look at information in ways that are difficult to get at using other methods. For instance, time series analysis is possible using social media research methods and it may be easier.
- There are still a lot of organizations that don't know what to do with all this "Social Media Stuff" and the fact that they call it "Social Media Stuff" is one of the first indicators.
- Ethnography continues to be a very valid source of market research information. The methods of storing ethnographic information seem to be changing (is it possible to have an online ethnography?), but the goal is still the same. Help your clients tell the stories that are meaningful.
- There are ways for online access panels to check whether "who you say you are" is really "who you actually are". Online methods continue to evolve, change, and improve. Figure out if your access panel has the measures in play to run this core test.
- Prezi.com has a really cool presentation platform that really stands out. Much like this, to avoid commoditization you have to be differentiated.
- All those useful insights provided by others using hashtags on Twitter don't mean a thing if you don't save them somewhere...online or otherwise...(yeah, I wish I had all of that information instead of just my own notes and what I personally tweeted).
And, I guess one final observation...I dance a little like Elaine from Seinfeld. For those of you at the Kinect party, I'm sure you'll concur. Fortunately for me, much like my son, I don't get embarrassed...to easily.
All-in, the annual Las Vegas market research conference is truly a gem, a conference filled with holiday like atmosphere, educational and networking opportunities, and lots of after-hour fun. An emerald in the market research industry as it were. In the spirit of the season, here's a great Flogging Molly video: