Running 100K and hoping to raise £1000 for charity

Leave a Reply

On May 25th I am aiming to raise money for a great breast cancer awareness charity called CoppaFeel by running 100KM (about 62.5 miles) from London to Brighton, in under 15 hours, as part of the London to Brighton Challenge.

I’d really appreciate it if you consider sponsoring me via my just giving page.

Each year I do one sponsored challenge and I try to reach out to everybody only once per channel – however, that does mean if you are a Facebook friend, a contact of mine on LinkedIn, work in the same office etc, you still may get several requests – sorry about that 🙂

CoppaFeel is run by a couple of amazing twins, one of whom, Kris developed breast cancer at 23 and had to battle to be tested as younger people do not often get breast cancer. You can read about Kris’s story on the website – my daughter met Kris and her twin Maren a couple of years ago and my family have been supporters of CoppaFeel ever since.

It’s time everybody understood mobile research

Leave a Reply

In 2012 there has been a massive growth in conferences focused on mobile research, and on mobile sessions in regular conferences. Mobile research has been the next big thing for about fifteen years, but the number of people who feel it has arrived is growing.

One of the reasons that people feel mobile has arrived is that respondents are voting with their fingers. A growing number of respondents are using smartphones to complete our surveys, even when we haven’t asked them.

As a share of all market research, mobile is smaller than postal. But, the spread of postal and mobile is very different. Postal is restricted to a small sub-set of agencies and research problems, most modern researcher won’t come across a postal study in a normal year, and may never come across one. By contrast, most researchers will find some of their respondents are using mobile devices to complete their surveys, and I suspect many researchers will be involved in research that specifically seeks to utilise mobile devices in 2013.

If most researchers are going to encounter mobile research they need to get up to speed with the basics and the best practices. Luckily there are two online training sessions in a couple of weeks, as part of the Festival of NewMR’s Training Day, Monday December 3rd.

The first session is at 3pm, Sydney time (midday in Singapore) and will see Lachlan Stokoe provide insight into mobile research best practices. A few hours later, at 3pm GMT (10am in New York) Kam Sidhu of Lumi Technologies will share an introduction into mobile research.

Click here to see the NewMR Training Day.

Do Playtex Watch Their Facebook Page?

Leave a Reply

Playtex have been getting quite a bit of negative social media coverage about their bra fitting advice, particularly from war on plus four (declaration of interest, my daughter owns and runs a lingerie business, Mish-Online, which is why I know more than I ought about bras).

However, despite all this social media criticism, Playtex’s Facebook page is a classic example of what happens if a brand creates a page and does not adequately moderate or engage members. Playtex asked the question as “Complete the phrase: PLAYTEX is to FIT, as ___ is to ___.”

Women have seized the chance to make comments, and to attack Playtex. For example, Kryptonite to Superman, lemon juice to milk, and as a vegan is to raw lamb. When I checked the thread earlier today (see here), there were 93 comments, and masses of likes.

A Facebook page with comments only makes sense if it is an active discussion between the brands and it ‘fans’. Creating a place to let people publicly ridicule you, without any engagement or response is not a sensible option.

Do we need another market research association?

Leave a Reply

The Merlien Qual360 Conference in Milan last week saw the launch of a new research association, the MMRA (Mobile Marketing Research Association). You can visit their website and you can read more about them at Research-Live.

I wish the association well, and I hold its two founders (Jasper Lim and Mark Michelson) in high regard. However, (could you hear the however coming?) I am not sure that research needs another association – indeed I wonder if there are already too many associations?

In these social and collaborative times, what is the role of a trade association? LinkedIn Groups, the initiatives of NewMR and GreenBook, impromptu events such as Research Club all seem to prosper without having the status of being ‘associations’.

My feeling is that the research industry needs a national or international body to ‘officially’ represent the profession to legislators and to liaise with other bodies of a similar status. But I doubt that research needs new ‘associations’ to tackle specific niches and topics. Do we need committees, membership categories and fees, a board elected by members, and its own view on standards and ethics?

My feeling is that the traditional association structure is too slow, too concerned with its own processes, and is typically too slow at realising that it is no longer necessary. My suggestion for the future is one based on a) informal and ad hoc groupings of researchers organised via social media and b) commercial organisations who attract subscribers on the basis of what they offer, without feeling the need to create an apparatus of committees, elections etc.

Ray Poynter, EVP Vision Critical

Free Online Course on Information Theory from Stanford University

Leave a Reply

Stanford University has a number of free online courses on offer, including one on Information Theory, which begins in March 2012. The course has been broken down into 8-12 minute chunks – amounting to about 2 hours per week. There will be quizzes and a QA forum.

The other courses available include Entrepreneurship, Natural Language Processing, and Game Theory – scroll to the bottom of the Information Theory page to see the other courses.

Conecta Create Great Event at ESOMAR 3D in Miami

Leave a Reply

Conecta, a company providing access panels in Latin America and USA created what was probably the best conference event of the year last night. Conecta provided a three-hour cruise in Miami, allowing the conference attendees to spend the evening mixing, drinking, eating, plus music and dancing.

Everyone who chose to go on the cruise, which seemed to me most of conference attendees, had a wonderful evening, mixing business and pleasure, with lots of new contacts being made.

Was it a savvy sponsorship move? I am not sure. Conecta were at the event and very pleasant, but the branding was weak and there was not a lot of brand specific information or associations. But, Conecta deserve a massive thank you for creating such a wonderful evening, and personally I would hope that people would at least visit their website to find out more about them.

NewMR launches a Training Day

Leave a Reply

Last year NewMR created a new approach to market research conferences by launching the Festival of NewMR. This year the Festival has been expanded in several ways, including for example an Innovation Challenge with a cash prize of $20,000. But perhaps the most needed addition was the Training Day, which will be on 31 October 2011.

The Training Day is targeted at newer researchers and researchers looking to expand their skills into new areas. The Training Day is also targeted at Asia, a region that has fewer resources for face-to-face training. In a virtual conference targeting means the time of day, and the Training day is going to run from 6:00am GMT to 9:40am GMT (in terms of other time zones the Training day starts at: Sydney 5pm, Singapore 2pm, New Delhi 11:30am, and Moscow 10:00am).

In order to maximise the number of people who can attend the event, the Training Day does not have a fixed charge. If you are a student, if you can’t persuade you employer to pay, or if you live in a country where PayPal does not work, just register and attend. If you can afford to pay we like to invite you to make a donation towards the costs of the event.

Speakers on the day include sessions on Mobile Research, Ethnography, Online Communities, Conjoint Analysis, Segmentation, Online Questionnaire Design, and the use of Storytelling in market research presentation.

If you would like to find out more visit the NewMR Training Day page.

If you would like to find out more about the Festival visit the Festival Website.

NewMR, a view of the next two years

Leave a Reply

Want to know what I think will be changing over the next two years, what the hits and misses will be? Tune in on November 3rd and catch my presentation on the Main Stage of the Festival of NewMR (it’s all virtual, so you can do it from your desk).

Topics I’ll be covering

  1. Gamification, are they just playing at it?
  2. Mobile, when will it ever get moving?
  3. MROCs, are they a strategy or a tactic?
  4. Why social media monitoring is at most only 10% of the answer
  5. Where are community panels going next?
  6. Has collaboration gone away?
  7. What are the limits of DIY?
  8. How some NewMR companies will get into Big Data

Between now and November 3rd, please shout our your questions and ideas, and I’ll work them into the presentation.

And, if you want to see the presentation, you’ll need to get yourself a ticket, from the NewMR website.

Communities in 2017

Leave a Reply

I have just submitted a synopsis for the MRS Conference (get yours in quick if you want a chance to be selected). In the synopsis I suggest that research communities are going to change and I would love to hear your thoughts.

Below is a copy of my synopsis.

Communities seem to be the most commercially successful of all new tools that have entered the research arena. From short-term ad-hoc MROCs which focus on qual, through to the large-scale, ongoing community panels that can offer quant and qual, communities have dominated conferences agendas and have been the subject of key company purchases (e.g. Communispace, GlobalPark, and Vovic). Most major brands have at least one community for research and many have multiple communities. It is fair to say that communities have become a mainstream research technique.

However, nothing stands still in the world of online research and I predict that by 2017 the landscape will be very different.

The drivers of change, in ascending order of importance will be:

  1. The need to be cheaper and faster.
  2. The need for clients to be able to ‘DIY’ more of the process, which will mean non-researchers on the client-side being able to run projects.
  3. The need to integrate communities (and other forms of research) with Big Data.

If we look at Big Data from the client’s view, we see CRM data, loyalty card data, web analytics, account information, social media activity, and much more. The community of the future (perhaps the near future) will be the entire customer base.

The future research community will not be based on a group of customers all doing some similar task. The future community will be an extension of the community panel model, where different sub-groups of customers participate in very different tasks, including auto-ethnography, ideation, online qual, face-to-face qual, quant surveys, and even MROCs. The difference is that, subject to appropriate permissions, all the interactions and information are fed back into the system and the learnings generalised to the wider customer base.

Although communities have become mainstream; my prediction is that they will become the dominant form of research, or rather the dominant environment for research. Before online research there was not a truly dominant method, there was a mixture of telephone, door-to-door, and central location, all supported by a myth of representivity. Online access panels changed all of that, the research industry moved over to ‘non-rep’ convenience samples. Online access panels are a sort of community, but they are not brand or client focused, so they will find it hard to integrate with Big Data. The extended community panel model, where the entire customer base is seen as the community, delivers the opportunity for Big Data integration and a better reason for respondents to participate, they are making their brand better, better for them.