Blackbeard Blog

Nine Hopefully Awesome Things At The Research 2012 Conference

The tagline for Research 2012 is “The festival of ideas”. Can it live up to that billing? I’m hopeful: the MRS conference has carved out a place in the industry calendar as a place where new thinking, practical demonstrations and an unexpected playfulness can thrive - of all the research conferences it’s the one I’d most recommend a non-researcher goes to.

Of course I’m hardly disinterested here. This will be the fifth year running I’ve done something at the MRS conference (I’m presenting the Research Outlaws session, a heady mix of Pecha Kucha, the Great Egg Race and Judge Dredd). The MRS has, consciously or not, forged this identity by giving a coterie of regulars plenty of opportunity to do interesting things under a wider banner. If there’s anything problematic about the conference’s evolution, it’s that these regulars have become a bit too regular - a difficult thing to say since a) I’m one and b) all of them do terrific work and are guaranteed good chairs and speakers.

We could do, maybe, with being disrupted, whether from newcomers or people outside the industry - for all that this is the best MRX conference there’s a sad lack of crossover with even our close neighbours in planning, academia or digital strategy.

Enough navel gazing! I’ve lured you in with a list-y title and it’s time to deliver. Here are the conference highlights from my perspective (leaving out stuff I’ve already seen in one form or another, and my own sesh!):

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2012 (2): The House Always Wins

The most memorable conversation I had at the ESOMAR 3D conference this year wasn’t about research at all: it was about poker. Josh, from BrainJuicer’s marketing team, is a keen online poker player, and explained the extent to which online poker in particular is a percentage game – playing for incremental gains on multiple virtual tables. All the regular players, he said, are using apps and algorithms to automatically calculate their odds and are adjusting their play accordingly. Which leaves the newbies and the suckers who want to see poker as a social game, or imagine it’s a game allowing for flair, or employ a range of other losing strategies which are generally based on individuality rather than trusting the numbers.

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2012 (1): New Years’ On A Rational Planet

I had planned to post this before new year, but was too busy doing actual research (how gauche). But like Christmas decorations and turkey leftovers, year-end predictions posts ought not to be showing up on January 5th. So let’s pretend this ISN’T the first in a series of ten (ten!) such things.

Even if I WAS about to write a predictions post, I would be using this second paragraph for caveats. In the ever-rolling sea of market research I am but one small coracle, and I tend to follow my nose after things which interest me, rather than sit on high and worry about the fate of the industry. And where better to start than on something I am almost completely uninformed about (I am hardly alone in this). Yes, it’s “Big Data” time!

Everything in research and marketing now is happening against the backdrop of encroaching “big data” – though this has been true for a few years now. What ought to be occurring at the moment is a shift away from swooning over the idea of big data and an interest in embracing its practicalities. But actually this isn’t really going on, partly because for non-specialists like us getting to grips with business intelligence concepts can be like reading Martian – let alone trying to use the software. All I can really offer is a read on “big data” as a cultural concept within research and business – big data as meme, if you like.

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Back To The Future

There is no greater magnet for hubris and nonsense than the end of year TREND PREDICTIONS post, so obviously I make one every year. There is a little blackbeard angel on my shoulder, though, who tells me “At least be accountable!”. So before posting this year’s set of stocking-fillers, here’s my yearly look BACK at what I’ve claimed in the past.

The 2009 list - ten predictions, date of fruition unspecified. And the 2010 list - eleven thoughts mostly about “big data”. What was I right about and how much? I’ve sorted the ideas into four categories in roughly descending order of correctness so you can see for yourselves…

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» Thoughts On Digital Culture (1)

This is my music column which was published today - it’s also exploring some of my ideas on what “digital culture” might be, why it matters, and what its internal conflicts and schisms are, so I’m linking it here too.

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The Top 20 MRX Tweeters: RESEARCHED!

Look! Yonder! A Diversion!

I couldn’t resist doing a bit of number crunching on these candidates.

Location: 13 are from North America (10 USA, 3 Canada), 5 from Europe, 2 from Australia. Africa, Asia, LatAm not represented.

Demographics: 12 men, 8 women. All - as far as I can tell from profile pics - are white. (I am aware that one of the profile pics is a sock monster but I have inside information as to the ethnicity of this researcher).

Self-presentation: Everyone opts for a picture of themselves. 19 out of 20 use a head or head-and-shoulder shot - @VirtualMR is the only one of these who goes so far as showing an arm. The remaining 1 out of 20 uses a picture of their hand concealed under a sock beast. 13 out of 20 mention their employer in their bio; 16 out of 20 use a Twitter name which relates to their real name (the other 4 relate it to their profession). 10 out of 20 are wearing specs.

Twitter usage: Here’s where things get more intriguing.

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State Of Play: Four Types Of Research Gamification

This time last year I was writing a talk for the inaugural Festival of New MR about surveys as videogames (you can read what I said here). The ideas in it had been bouncing around for a while but I realised there was mileage in exploring them at length.

I should say right now that I don’t want any credit for starting any kind of conversation around games in research: the word gamification had been around for a while already, and my theoretical musings were quickly trumped by more practical evidence from real pioneers like Jon Puleston. Besides, the stuff I worried and cared about most in the talk - about strategy, ideas emerging through play, unintended consequences - was the stuff nobody else seemed to run with.

And research commentators have, in general, run with games hard. Since then hardly a week has gone by without some gamification article in the research blogosphere, and no conference seems complete without some mention of it. The appetites for details, debate and debunking remain absurdly high.

It seems like a good time to take stock of the different directions ‘research gamification’ is going in right now. I’ve found four of them:

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The Shrinking World

Facebook got a lot of coverage yesterday for this blog post, which discussed two studies of its “social graph”. The headline finding - and the one used as lede by most of the coverage - was the idea that, as Mashable put it, Facebook has shrunk the “Degrees of Separation” between people in the world from “six to four”.

It’s actually more like - fans of mathematical rounding look away now lest yr faith in Mashable be forever shaken - “from 5.3 to 4.7”. And to say the least there are a lot of caveats. (For instance, while generalising from “Facebook” to “The World” is probably fine for a bunch of variables, ‘connectedness’ may not be among them.) But “Six Degrees” was always as much slogan as science so this doesn’t really bug me.

What does irk a bit is that neither Facebook nor any commentators gets beyond the gosh-wow idea that the world is ‘shrinking’ to ask what the practical, cultural or other implications of this might be. What good does it do us to know that the number of degrees of separation is now 4.7 not 5.3? How might it change the world?

As it happens, when I came across this story I was reading Mark Earls’ new book, I’ll Have What She’s Having (co-written with Alex Bentley and Michael J O’Brien). I’ll write a proper review of this at some point, but for now I was struck by a couple of findings he summarises which point to reasons the Facebook finding MIGHT be interesting.

They’re in his chapter on cascades, which is a very dense summary of a lot of 90s and 00s network, complexity and evolutionary science. I am not a scientist, and I may have misunderstood bits of what Earls and Co. are talking about: take this post as the hypothesising of an educated layman. But the book talks about two things which happen to information cascades when networks tighten and get more interconnected.

The first (via Stuart Kauffman) is that highly connected networks are more chaotic: from an evolutionary perspective their fitness landscape is shifting all the time, so there’s very little chance of agents in the network converging on a single ‘best’ strategy. And the second, related, point (via Duncan Watts) is that as the connections within networks increase, the chance of large scale cascades - so many people copying behaviour that it “sweeps” the system - actually shrinks. This is because an individual agent becomes overwhelmed by signals from their connections and it becomes much harder to decide which to copy.

Can we apply this to the real world and the Facebook case? Well, imagine you’re a marketer who hears that Facebook is shrinking the world. Your reaction to the press release might be “Hurrah! It will become much easier for my message to spread!” But take into account the findings I’ve summarised from Earls’ book and your reaction should instead be “Oh shit.” A more interconnected world means a shorter lifespan for your message and a smaller chance of large-scale behavioural change.

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bmichael:

Another (ugly) way to represent the music on my iTunes from 1990 to 2011. The pie represents a total of 126.26 gigabytes. Year tagging is inaccurate in that, for instance, Nevermind is partially tagged as 2011 because of the reissue. John Fahey is in 2011. A bunch of afrofunk compilations are in the 2000s. Blind Willie Johnson is in 1998. I’m not at the point where I have the energy to tag releases by recording date.

Hott 3-D Pie Chart action reblogged for Annie P. Plus pastels! Plus segments differentiated by fades! Pie chart “heaven”.

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Rosencrantz And Brandenstern Are Dead

I was linked to this blog post by a tweet highlighting that “94% of conversations about brands happen offline”. It’s probably true. It feels truthical. Maybe it’s really 93% or 81% or 74.6%, it doesn’t really matter. What jumped out at me was the phrase “conversations about brands”, which I’ve seen in a few places.

I think this phrase might mean something silly. I can’t prove it, mind you. But I wonder if it’s mixing up two things: conversations about brands - which happen occasionally, don’t get me wrong! - and conversations about activities, friends, news, life, and so on in which brands have a walk-on part. I bet those happen more.

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