Dealing with Internet research panels is like securing your house when you’re going away on vacation. There are all sorts of steps you can take to burglar-proof your home, but the plain fact is that if a burglar wants in badly enough, you’re going to get burglarized in spite of all your careful precautions. Police officers will tell you that the goal of burglar-proofing your home is not to make it impossible for burglars to break in, but to make it much more difficult for them, and therefore much less likely to happen.

Quality checks on Internet panels work the same way. I may not be able to ensure panel quality 100%, but there are plenty of steps I can take (and have taken) to make it a far higher likelihood that I’m getting good data. Continue reading »

The experts believe that the benefits of mobile research include further engaging participants, as well as providing them with increased convenience. Sabine Stork, Senior Partner and Owner of market research firm Thinktank http://www.thinktank.uk.com/, explains, “One of the big upsides of mobile is that you get…unmediated insight into people’s lives…you’re handing over the tools and its kind of empowering I suppose to some extent.” Stork describes it as ‘democratizing marketing’, and Murphy agrees that it enhances consumers’ control over their relationship with a brand. Continue reading »

GreenBook and Merlien Institute are Co-Producing the 2nd International Conference on Market Research in the Mobile World coming up July 19-20 in Atlanta. If you are engaged in the practice or management of market research, business intelligence, marketing, or in developing mobile and social media technologies this unique opportunity MUST NOT BE MISSED! Continue reading »

As The Lone Researcher (keeping that Wild Wild West metaphor going) in the crowd, I wasn’t sure how I would be perceived by my fellow attendees. I was pleasantly surprised that most folks I spoke to immediately saw the possibilities of Crowdsourcing in the MR tool kit, particularly as a replacement to ideation groups. The primary advantage of Crowdsourcing being the iterative nature of the work, which allows the crowd to continually improve on the original idea so you’re left with a perfectly cut gem (at least in theory). Continue reading »

Our 16 year old has a learner’s permit. Next year, he’ll be driving. A little scary, but he will be prepared. He studied a manual, took a written test, and will take driving lessons before he hits the road.

If only we had the same system for surveys. If people were required to be licensed to launch a survey, it sure would prevent nasty “accidents” and lots of near misses. Continue reading »

The background research on mobile methods, detailing the benefits and uses as well as the limitations, give a good indication of why proponents of mobile research urge others to adopt it. Surveys of market research firms have quantified what the industry thinks of this new method (Macer & Wilson, 2009a ; 2009b ; 2011 and Murphy 2011 ), but a more in-depth, qualitative understanding of what leading experts think about the topic could be useful to supplement these numbers. This qualitative approach offers insight into when and how mobile methods can best be leveraged, going beyond the numbers to take an in-depth look into the mobile market research landscape. Continue reading »

Tom Anderson has been holding a research meme contest for a few months now, and it ends this week . I’ve found the creativity, humor, and insight demonstrated by all the submitters inspiring, but I couldn’t find time to try my hand at creating one myself. Well, this weekend I finally did and submitted the results into the NGMR contest. Continue reading »

Off to Mountain View, CA for the 1st Annual Crowdsortium Conference. Mountain View is best known as the home of Google and in fact the conference will be held within Google’s Headquarters. With apologies to Mark Twain, I do feel a bit like “A Jersey Researcher in the Crowdsourcing Court”. Even the agenda itself is wide open and speaks to the “anything is possible” entrepreneurial spirit. In fact, I can’t help but notice how different the mindset is from my world of MR. Continue reading »

Robert Moran, Margaret Roller, Jeffrey Henning, Ray Poynter, and Kathleen Poulos all contribute great new perspectives to the debate on the “Future of Research”; here is a summary of their views. Continue reading »

Our content partners at ResearchAccess are doing a series of posts on the topic and I think they are leading up to something very interesting. Frequent contributor Romi Mahajan kicked things off with a post on why he thinks Gameization is Game-Changing: Continue reading »