What’s Trending on #MRX? Jeffery Henning’s #MRX Top 10 – April 17, 2012

Of the 1,500 links shared on the Twitter #MRX community in the past two weeks, here are the top 10 most retweeted.

 

1. Google Makes Their Market Research Play: Now What? – Lenny Murphy argues that Google’s entrance into the U.S. market research industry indicates it is here to stay. Google’s offering will expand as Google eventually branches beyond the U.S., integrates its surveys with Android mobile devices, starts leveraging respondent information gathered from Gmail and Google+ and adds unstructured response types.
2. The Top 10 TED Talks Every Market Researcher Should See – The Researchist has curated a great list of TED videos, spanning everything from gamification, product placement, trust and smiling to flying robots.
3. What will Google’s Survey Tool mean for MR? – For Research, four competitors of Google’s new offering (and one end user) chime in with their positions.
4. In Praise of Face to Face – In one of his last articles for Research magazine, Robert Bain (now the editor of Lux magazine) does some face-to-face interviews of his own with proponents of face-to-face research. While face-to-face does not get the love and attention of online research, it does get the dollars, as Robert points out: “Annual spending on face-to-face research amounted to $8.4bn [in 2010, according to ESOMAR], up from $6.4bn in 2006. Online methods may be growing more quickly, but they still remain smaller in revenue, at $7.5bn.”
5. Should Researchers Be More Like Advertising Planners?  – Edward Appleton, constantly looking for inspiration to take research to the next level, finds six things to admire about ad planners.
6. How to Know You’re Asking the Wrong Question – Tom Webster of Edison Research makes hamburger of Burger King’s recent market research, pointing out that it went astray by asking the wrong questions – or, at the very least, by stopping after getting the answers to the wrong questions.
7. If You’re Having Google Problems, I Feel Bad For You, Son – Tom Ewing has seven reflections on Google Consumer Surveys, noting its awkwardness as it attempts to bridge disparate worlds: a mobile-ready NewMR focus on short questions (200 words) yet an old MR example that assumes respondents know their own past behavior in detail.
8. Google Consumer Surveys: How It Works – This interactive graphic from Google shows the four steps to using Google Consumer Surveys: 1) Create a survey, 2) Respondents complete the survey on publisher websites, 3) Publishers get paid as respondents answers, 4) View aggregated and analyzed data.
9. What is Google up to with Consumer Surveys? – Simon Chadwick of Cambiar says Google Consumer Surveys is the classic disruptor: “The professional research community may well look upon this and conclude that it isn’t ‘real’ research; after all, it can’t handle complex innovation projects or brand trackers, can it? Yes, well that was what DEC said about personal computers and what Polaroid said about digital photography. A disruptive technology will always enter a market with a supposedly inferior product at a ridiculously low price.”
10. Google makes MR entrance with Consumer Surveys tool – Ironically, the actual news coverage of Google’s entrance was less shared than everyone’s opinions about what that entrance means. James Verrinder of Research has the details.