March 2009
16 posts
Perverted By Language
I’m at the ARF conference in New York - it’s an interesting experience: I’ve never been to a US conf before and my first impression is that it’s more earnest and salesy than the UK equivalent would be - and that more is probably getting done. This may be because the boozing and bitching is happening off my radar, of course. I’m speaking tomorrow about what happens...
Some more things about Twitter
I have been writing things about Twitter over on my proper blog. They are intended for a general audience, even though one of them is a talk from a market research convention, and I put my “twitterphant” post here. I’m not good with compartmentalisation!
Tweets in the rear view mirror may appear more numerous than they are.
Everything I know about social media I learned from...
Qual n Quant
Conference observation 1: when I talk to qualitative researchers they tend to assume I’m a qualitative researcher. When I talk to quantitative researchers they tend to assume I’m a quantitative researcher. I’m not sure whether this means I’m doing something right or just that I instinctively bluff. Of course I have no idea whether these people assume I’m a good...
Are we human or are we dancer?
John Griffiths has some good thoughts on the future structure of market research - it’s inspired me to try a similarly ambitious post expanding on something I mentioned yesterday: the idea that the framing approaches in research next decade will be two semi-opposed schools of thought - the “humanists” and the “determinists”.
What do I mean by this? The humanists,...
The Research 2009 Takeaway
Thoughts on half a research conference (MRS Research 2009 - I have too bad a cold to attend the second day).
1. Uncertainty is in: As one of the speakers mentioned, the most dropped name at conference this year was Nicholas Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan. Taleb is not a natural ally of market researchers as his key point (or one of them) is that we tend to rationalise events post-facto...
The Blind Men And The Twitterphant: A Fable
Five blind men were walking through the jungle one day, when they heard the cry of a mighty beast. “It must be the legendary Twitterphant” they said. They hurried in the direction of the sound, and each crept up on the animal from a different direction.
The first blind man was a marketing consultant, and he reached out and touched the Twitterphant’s trunk. “This makes a...
The Bulworth Effect And The Graveyards of...
(This is an expansion of a response to a post on the excellent Zebra Bites blog.)
In the film Bulworth, Warren Beatty plays a senator whose perspective is radically changed when he falls in love with a poor young black activist. One of the points of the film is that this is a utopian fantasy of social contact: the Bulworths of this world aren’t likely to form the ties that would sweep them...
Nine People Who Know Stuff You Don't About...
One of the awesome things about marketing and research in the digital era is that it’s become an interdisciplinary practise. We don’t just pay attention to marketers, planners, advertisers any more - we learn stuff from behavioural economists, sociobiologists, mathematicians, anthropologists….
But why stop there? Here are nine individuals who know more than you do about some...
Mmmm.....nodes
I love a new bit of jargon and so you can imagine now delighted I was to learn this morning about “pareto nodes”. These are basically the things at the top end of a power law distribution, which tends to be the distribution that operates in an interactive environment. So for instance the distribution of Twitter followers is almost certainly a power law distribution, and the pareto...
Conversation is nomadic
A couple of blog posts caught my attention over the last few days. Firstly, the widely quoted research by Nielsen saying that social media is now “more popular” than email. Second, Nigel Hollis of Millward Brown’s continuing efforts to find a money model for Facebook.
I’m not going to comment on the specifics of Hollis’ posts, other than to say I’m not...
Research Agencies on Twitter →
I was going to put this here but it got too long.
It’s a list of a bunch of research agencies on Twitter (by all means suggest more!) with some thoughts at the end on what they’re doing and whether it’s working.
Scales! →
For some reason I have thought it appropriate to subject the readers of my main blog to some REAL TALK about ratings scales.
The last post
…was a deliberate attempt to write a post in “social media blogspeak”. I hope you enjoyed it.
Social media research is...
Social media research is…
A move from researching individuals to researching networks.
WHICH MEANS: You’re looking at people’s performed reactions not their private reactions.
WHICH MEANS: You’re moving from measuring opinion to measuring opinion AND influence.
WHICH MEANS: You’re not looking at people’s data as a discrete object, you’re looking at it as a social object. Shareable not private....
Conference Calls: Threat or Menace?
Tragically my third of three conference calls today was scuppered by a gremlin in the WebEx machine, so instead I am going to blog about them.
I do not like conference calls. Who does really? It’s no reflection of the people on them - I am lucky enough to work with lots of insightful ones - and not usually down to the content: even in the research industry, we live in interesting times....
The Repeat Tweet Paradox
This is an interesting researchlet: how long a tweet drives traffic after you’ve posted it. (Answer: not long!)
What’s the solution? Use another platform where longevity is longer? Noooooo - the answer is to spam your followers! “Tweet, and tweet again” as they say.
Of course, if everyone takes this advice, the half-life shrinks still further and the system gets more...
