The Future Of Research - Revisited
Towards the end of last year I put up a post called “The Future Of Research: 10 Odd Ideas”. Though I hedged my bets and said I didn’t think all this stuff would happen in 2010, I thought it would be a nice idea to go back and see how right I was. If at all!
1. Respondents RIP
What I thought: The perceived power of crunchable real-time data will render the individual respondent extinct.
Has it happened? Not yet! But it’s closer than I thought it might be - I’ve seen presentations (eg. from InSites) talking about data mining, and what’s also interesting is that the central notion that the individual respondent is a bad, unreliable source of direct data is gaining more and more credence.
2. Social Meteorology
What I thought: The focus of social media monitoring will shift to predictive work - classifying and forecasting events, treating social like a weather system.
Has it happened? I’m not sure. I always feel I’m a little out of touch on monitoring, that there must be more exciting things happening than I’m aware of. I did a presentation about this stuff - social currents - at Research 2010 in the Spring and it was fairly well received but I don’t think I got the point over as well as I might. I’m still really interested in spontaneous (as well as planned) social events and I don’t think enough work is being done here.
3. Dawn Of The Replicants
What I thought: “Research Bots” - artificial respondents - will develop as a tool.
Has it happened? Yes! Well, sort of. What I didn’t know when I wrote the post last November is that Brainjuicer have been working on this technique and in 2010 they started talking about it publically. In fact, I’m really looking forward to hearing John Kearon talk about it during tomorrow’s Festival of New MR conference. At the moment bots are being used as a kind of digital concept board or pen-portrait - we’re not (yet) at the level where they can interact successfully in “the wild” or be used to simulate responses. That’s when things will get really intriguing.
4. Data Brokers
What I thought: Data is valuable, so people will start to take charge of theirs - and put a price on it.
Has it happened? No, but I’m more convinced than ever that it will. We’re seeing steps towards it both in the increased awareness of privacy issues and in the movement (however flawed) to metricise and monetise ‘influence’. Control over information - what you give away, what you charge for, and how much - will be increasingly important for people tagged as ‘influentials’.
5. Business Class Research
What I thought: A swankier, more comfortable, more luxurious and engaging research experience for the really prized respondents.
Has it happened? I was being a little tongue in cheek here. But I’ve had some interesting discussions this year about how one would create high-end bespoke communities for hard-to-reach participants, and I’ve also seen presentations at conferences focusing on the elite and expert nature of the communities they’ve built for clients. So this is happening at the MROC level I think.
6. Spontaneous Surveys
What I thought: An AdSense for survey questions - individual questions served up based on searches and browsing, kind of like river sampling but at a really modular, granular level.
Has it happened: No, and while I think the idea is really fun I’m not sure it will - I’m not sure where the practical applications are. But modularity is important (as I’ll discuss in next week’s 2011 trends post) (tease tease)
7. Goodbye Community, Hello Swarm
What I thought: Researchers will get interested in spontaneous communities and how they work.
Has it happened? See my answer to #2 above! Basically, not really. There’s still a lot of focus on artificial research environments, and on analysing the social media as a mass and deriving metrics from it - but the way flows of information work within social media seems frustratingly elusive. Maybe it’s just a wrong tree to bark up!
8. Peak Crowd
What I thought? Just as we’ve (arguably) over-researched respondents, we’ll over-engage and over-crowdsource them and diminishing returns will set in.
Has it happened? Yes and no. There’s been a backlash against the marketing crowdsourcing bandwagon - “help us choose our new [x]”. “your design could appear here”, etc. But as a research tool it has an advantage - it means we can be more relational and less transactional with respondents than a marketer would be. So no peak quite yet.
9. Play Power
What I thought? Researchers will need to learn from game designers to keep respondents engaged.
Has it happened? This is the topic of my talk at the NewMR festival tomorrow, so I will save speculation for that! (Answer: Yes! Sort of.)
10. Social Sabotage
What I thought: Savvy operators will exploit people’s naive trust in the truth of social media data, and we’ll see more commercial astroturfing and gaming of social media results.
Has it happened? It’s on the cusp. A certain amount of sentiment spamming is a given, but we’re seeing more and more self-awareness among social media users about who’s listening and why.
