Jeffrey Hennings’s #MRX Top Ten – Diversity, Data, Dislikes and Vocal Minorities

By Jeffrey Henning

Of the 1500 links shared by the Twitter #MRX community in the past two weeks, here are 10 of the most retweeted.

1. Please take our survey – Research magazine and Decipher are conducting a study on diversity within the market research industry, and they’d like you to take their survey.
2. Customers are not Data – Dan Womack uses some James McMurtry lyrics to challenge the assumption that Big Data will let you “understand who your customers are as people”.
3. Are The Heavy Users Of #MRX #SM Ahead Of The Curve Or Just Talking To Themselves? – Ray Poynter asked 33 attendees to his social-media workshop in Amsterdam about their own personal use of social media and their research use of different social media tools. Their answers may surprise you.
4. Conferences Redefined – Tom Ewing celebrates the recent “Redefining Research” conference in Leeds, and hopes for more like it.
5. New Facebook Study Examines “The Power of Like” – Gerry Wendel of Modland USA casts a skeptical eye on the recent ComScore/Facebook study on what drives engagement among Facebook fans.
6. 10 Attempts to Rebrand Market Research – Dana Stanley suggests in Research Access ten possible 10 new names for “market research”. Make sure to read the insightful comments, as well.
7. Recession now ‘deeply embedded’ in consumer consciousness – As the UK slips into recession again, Kantar released its findings into the mindset of UK consumers, finding that 48% of UK households are “struggling to meet their monthly budgets”  and 80% of those employed expect their income to stay the same or decrease over the next 12 months.
8. Ray Poynter interviews Finn Raben, Paul McDonald and Brett Slatkin on Google Consumer Surveys – Audio recording of a 40-minute interview by Ray Poynter and Lenny Murphy of Paul McDonald and Brett Slatkin of Google and Finn Raben of Esomar.
9. The trouble with tracking [PDF] – Jan Hofmeyr of TNS has a must-read white paper on the problems with current tracking studies, which represent a significant ongoing investment yet are often invalid at the respondent level.
10. Maritz Research Poll Finds Online Consumers Want Companies to Listen and Respond – Maritz contrasted consumer attitudes towards private feedback channels (i.e., email, web forms) and public feedback channels (i.e., social media, communities) and found the younger the consumer the more likely they were to prefer to use public feedback.