January 2012
3 posts
Nine Hopefully Awesome Things At The Research 2012...
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...
2 tags
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...
3 tags
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...
December 2011
3 posts
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...
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.
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...
November 2011
7 posts
2 tags
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...
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...
Normification V Gamification; or; What Can We... →
If, like me, you’ve disliked Klout for a while, this article may give you a warm glow - assuming you can beat back yr tears for the professional bloggers who’d staked their reputations on a “social influence” service.
But the logic of the piece is worth digging into because it has implications for the research business too - we are (quite often) also an industry which...
Degamification
1. Only The Sillies
And the little bears growl to each other, “He’s mine, As soon as he’s silly and steps on a line.” And some of the bigger bears try to pretend That they came round the corner to look for a friend; And they try to pretend that nobody cares Whether you walk on the lines or squares. But only the sillies believe their talk; It’s ever so portant...
October 2011
3 posts
Thrice Upon A Time →
A blog for the Marketing Society. “About storytelling”, but it isn’t really. It’s about stories researchers tell themselves, which is slightly different. It’s also a potted summary of my keynote at a conference last month. It was a good keynote, though, so I’d be very happy for you to read this.
Best Y Axis Scale Ever →
September 2011
3 posts
Slinging My Hook
Today is - as mentioned in various places - my last day at Kantar Operations. On Monday week I’ll be joining Brainjuicer as their Digital Culture Officer. “Their what?” you say - well, I’ll get on to that. But first of all I want to say thankyou to Kantar.
There are a bunch of industry ideas about Kantar around, and for me the biggest misconception is that Kantar...
A Bit Of News
Two bits, really, and they’re related.
I’ll be leaving Kantar Operations next week, after almost three very stimulating years. I’m starting an amazing new job next month, and there will be news about what exactly that is very soon - at which point I’ll do a proper thankyou/goodbye/hype post. But I know some people contact me via the Kantar Ops address listed on this blog,...
How To Love A Loser →
Guest post by me for Betty Adamou’s Research Through Gaming blog.
August 2011
3 posts
2 tags
The Eleventh Thesis On Facebook
For as long as there has been a research industry, there has been a large and appreciative audience for clients telling us what’s wrong with it. Ten years ago, one of the many things wrong with it was “black boxes”. Big agencies were offering too many proprietary techniques which relied on these boxes - where you could feed data in and get metrics out but the process by which the...
The Rules Of Engagement
I was doing a bit of thinking today about engagement in online communities. Obviously “engagement” is an overweighted word and there’s plenty of debate around what it even is. So for my purposes I’m going to say “community engagement” means “being interested enough in a community to contribute to it”.
This is rightly seen as an important goal in...
July 2011
3 posts
A Use For Klout!
Regular readers will know I don’t like influence-metric peddlers Klout very much. However I have finally discovered a use case for them: they make an excellent empirical test of the effectiveness of parody Twitter accounts.
Take, for instance, the viciously funny and sharply observed @peanutfreemom. She has a Klout score of 75 - very high indeed for a non-celebrity. She is a “Thought...
What Makes A Great Keynote?
I am doing a keynote speech! It is at the Association Of Survey Computing’s annual conference at the end of September in Bristol.
This is the first time I’ve done a keynote, so I thought I’d ask Twitter people about what they expect from such a thing, as opposed to an ordinary paper. What did people say?
“Entertainment, but also some nuggets and thought starters”
...
Deindividuation and Networks
Still thinking about that Guardian piece.
Obviously there’s no question that deindividuation is a phenomenon online. And yes, the way you get round that - unless you actively embrace it, a la 4chan - is by raising the social costs of bad behaviour. The way in which sites have done this in the past is by allowing community standards to emerge and then letting the community broadly police...
May 2011
4 posts
The Technique That Should Not Be
On Twitter, @researchrants just posted some amazing screenshots from someone’s attempt to do an online survey using Magnitude Estimation (here’s the introductory one). I hadn’t seen a Mag.Est since the late 90s, when I was new to research, and I certainly haven’t seen anyone optimistic enough to try it online.
Magnitude Estimation is a glorious example of a research...
Think Insights, Google And Research →
“At Google, we believe that data beats opinion” runs the intro to Google’s new Think Insights venture - essentially a compilation of some of its original research on a microsite. Think Insights is something every researcher should have a look at - my initial reactions on Twitter were pretty negative but having dug around a bit more I think it’s an interesting exercise, a...
The Unsaid
Here are some reasons I think of posts I want to make on Tumblr (though most apply to any social network or tool) and then don’t write them.
I don’t find the time.
I decide the post won’t be interesting.
I realise I’m just saying “ditto” and click ‘like’ instead.
I know the post will cause arguments I don’t feel like having.
I can’t...
April 2011
1 post
“Gamification is at its heart a kind of measurement, and in a social context...”
– This is me! Talking about games over at Research Magazine’s site. Wanted to highlight these points - the parasitic nature of measurement in the social space, and the way communities create their own games - because I don’t see them mentioned much in this conversation.
March 2011
4 posts
Your Relations Are All Power
The talk that got me thinking the most at Research 2011 was by Charles Leadbeater, author of We-Think. He wasn’t talking about We-Think, though, he was talking about “intimacy at scale”, and specifically about an all-explaining DIAGRAM he had drawn on a powerpoint slide.
I am a big fan of diagrams, especially when they claim to explain everything, so as you can imagine I liked...
MRS 2011: A Conference In Miniatures
This is now at least three, possibly four, really good conferences in a row for the MRS - excellent work by the organisers. I’ve become enough of a conference circuit regular now to say confidently that this is my favourite event of the year.
Here’s a selection of notes, ideas, broad themes etc. I felt came out of the event. Obviously my choice of which panel or session to go to was...
Research For Nerds →
(It should really be “Nerds for Research”, but whatevs)
This is a SPIN-OFF TUMBLR from Blackbeard Blog, with a load of resources, outputs, explanations etc of the workshop Nick Gadsby and I ran at this week’s MRS conference. It will be a short-term blog and most of the stuff I’m talking about on it will fold back into this one sooner or later, but for now here it is!
The...
Research 2011: What I'm Up To
Hello! I am at the Research 2011 conference in London tomorrow and Wednesday - just finished my rehearsals. If you’re there, here’s what I’m involved in:
Online Communities (Tuesday 11am): I have a very easy gig on this panel, moderated by Rachel Lawes - I’m just there to nod sagely and provide comment as a wise old digital head (or some such!). The heavy lifting is being...
February 2011
10 posts
If I could delete one phrase from the social media...
… it would be “the conversation”.
Brands have to join the conversation. Companies have to listen to the conversation.
IT DOESN’T EXIST. There are conversations, lots and lots of different conversations. Some of them only have one person in! I mean, especially these days. I was watching that Father Ted last night with the most boring priest ever, where it ends with him...
““our choice of (for example) when to use abbreviations or not says so much...”
– from isabelthespy.tumblr.com
This is very true. And there are a hundred thousand microdialects of this kind of language out there, and this stuff changes all the time and very fast though there are overarching more slowly shifting principles someone cleverer (or more linguistics/communications...
Curiouser And Curiouser
Bill Guerin of Cambiar raises some interesting points here about why researchers don’t apply their principles to their own work. If they know so much about customer retention, for instance, why aren’t they good at retaining customers?
My thought on this is basically that most of Bill’s questions involve not just knowing about business, but being curious about it. And many...
Spiky Charts
Today I am going to blog about spiky charts. You know the ones! You see them in buzz or trend tracking presentations, or sentiment analysis decks. On the X axis is time, and on the Y axis is “buzz” or whatever, and the actual graph is like some kind of bizarro EEG reading, all mad spiky.
And you see them on neuromarketing charts too except there the spiky graph actually IS a...
What A Performance! →
I have been neglecting my RSS feeds I’m afraid - quite missed this Survey Geek post and the various responses to it.
In a nutshell, Reg is pointing out how ‘performed’ social media discourse is, and Ray Poynter responds by saying, well, so is all discourse.
I’m highlighting this here because a) I’ve been banging on about this for ages myself, and b) none of the...
Old MR, New MR, Borrowed MR, Blue MR
On Twitter this week Sean Copeland asked for 140-character definitions of “New MR” (here’s his write-up of the answers). Ray Poynter replied with a definition talking about epistemology and paradigms and he invented the idea so he should know. I jokily said something about how it’s all the stuff people initially think can’t possibly work, but now I’ve considered...
NERDTOPIA!
I spent an excellent few hours yesterday with research’s leading metal semiotician Nick Gadsby plotting our “Nerd Culture” workshop at the Research 2011 conference in March. It is not giving away too much to say that we had only the vaguest idea of what we might actually do when we wrote our excitable proposal last year, let alone how it would be interactive. But now we do know...
Five Reasons Gaming ISN'T The Next Research Big...
As promised, here’s the second half of my follow-up post to Ray Poynter’s gaming and MR mini-conference. This dose of - hopefully constructive - negativity isn’t meant to be taken alone, you should read the first post too.
As mentioned before, this is a collection of scattered thoughts inspired by gamification’s current status as a hot research topic. And this is the...
How Your Nielsen Ratings Sausage Is Made →
The notes around this entry - which relates to this old io9 post - seem to be about half intelligent people who know about sampling and about half equally intelligent people who don’t. It’s helping crystallise a bunch of thoughts about aggregation, representation, and people’s emotional relationship to data. Whether I get round to writing them up is, of course, another matter...
January 2011
7 posts
Five Reasons Gaming Has A Future In Market...
Yesterday saw a three-hour micro-conference on gaming and research, organised by Ray Poynter. As you probably know I find this stuff very interesting anyway, so I thought I’d organise some of the thoughts I had here (and a few thoughts I nicked from other people on the very entertaining tweetstream.)
So first of all, 5 good things about “gamification” and research, and then in...
Post-Facebook Social Media and Offline Identity
Quick thought! A couple of years ago it was very common to hear the line that the age of online anonymity and identity play was, essentially, over, and thanks to Facebook we were moving to a kind of social media where authenticity was the real currency and people’s social media identities would be tied to their real world identities.
And this is what has happened! On Facebook, anyway. That...
“Do the people who constantly pester us for our opinions care what each and every...”
– Laura Miller, How Novels Came To Terms With The Internet
Imaginary Communities #1
MORITURI
Morituri is an online forum which in look, feel and functionality works in the same way as other fora. The difference is that the length of one’s membership is strictly limited. On arrival in Morituri a new member is given an allowance of 999 posts. Each time they make a post, this number drops by 1, and when it reaches 0, they are allowed to make one final farewell post before...
We All Adore A Qu-Ora?
I checked out Quora a few months ago and left thinking, OK, this is conceptually interesting and culturally interesting but actually READING it is pretty boring. And broadly this is what I still think. But Quora is suddenly getting hype everywhere, so I thought I’d write a “What Quora Means For Research” post as a way jotting my impressions down.
If you don’t know what...
No One Man Should Have All That Klout →
I wrote a kind of response to that AdAge piece about influence, Klout and Justin Bieber that’s been doing the rounds. But because it was also about pop music and fandom I put it on my pop culture site, not here.