By Jeffrey Henning

Of the 3,039 unique links shared on the Twitter #MRX hashtag over the past two weeks, here are 10 of the most retweeted…

1. Using MR Automation to Keep Up with the Speed of Business – Roddy Knowles of Research Now argues that automation must be applied to the front end of research. “It’s common to approach every research project as its own unique creation, essentially building it from scratch … researchers will redesign whole questionnaires as standard practice … will re-create new audiences with custom screeners. There has been … resistance to automating the front end of the research project – specifically design – as to some it feels like it is infringing on the domain of the researcher.” He argues that the real front end requires stepping back and looking across multiple projects to identify their standard elements and create a customized template for future work.
2. New Political Identities formed by Brexit – 73% of Brits now consider themselves either Leavers or Remainers, “cutting across the traditional two-party British system [for] greater political uncertainty.”
3. MRS Launches Innovative Online Training with Kogan Page – The Market Research Society has partnered to develop an online course on Statistics for Research, with video content and interactive activities, designed for use on PCs, tablets, and mobile phones.
4. 5 Networking Strategies for Young Professionals – Writing in Quirks, Jill Johnson offers key pointers for networking: “1) Build your network before you need it. 2) Build relationships in small increments. 3) Be specific in asking for what you want. 4) Face time is critical. 5) Use your expertise to help others.”
5. When Virtual is Better than Reality – Amanda Ciccatelli, writing for TMRE, finds VR intersects with MRX in three key ways: speed to market, providing shopper-based insights in weeks rather than months; using real-time metrics rather than historic data; and aligning concepts better with the market.
6. Consumers Open to Fintech but Data Privacy Concerns Remain – Writing for Research Live, Jane Bainbridge recaps a Strive Insight survey of 1,000 Brits about financial technology: 69% are open to trying a new digital product from a new vendor, but 65% agree that banks rather than digital firms are most likely to offer high quality financial services.
7. The MRX Future Lens – IIeX North America 2017 – Daniel Evans of ZappiStore recaps a number of IIeX NA presentations. “Rather than doing more with less, client-side researchers are being asked to do more with existing data sets. But in order to achieve this, and to work with the boardroom in a more strategic way, they need time and breathing space.”
8. Top 5 Trends in the Electronics Industry – The Business Research Company’s newest report on electrical and electronic manufacturing sees five major trends: product design outsourcing, virtual reality, robotics/automation, IoT in household appliances, and increased demand for Smart TVs.
9. Defining Your Next Generation Customer Experience Strategy – Writing in Brand Quarterly, Charlene Li of Altimeter outlines three steps to a CX strategy: 1) understanding your customers’ objectives and how they are changing; 2) look beyond touchpoints and journeys to the overall customer relationships, in order to link CX strategy to the brand and business strategies; 3) and prioritize initiatives that make things easier and simpler for customers.
10. What Do US Consumers See As Their Core Drivers of Satisfaction With Companies?– An Accenture Strategy survey of 2,003 U.S. consumers found they had switched retailers (27%), TV service providers (13%), and banks (10%) due to poor service, and 8 in 10 said the previous provider could have done nothing to keep them.

Note: This list is ordered by the relative measure of each link’s influence in the first week it debuted in the weekly Top 5. A link’s influence is a tally of the influence of each Twitter user who shared the link and tagged it #MRX, ignoring retweets from closely related accounts. The following links are excluded: links promoting RTs for prizes, links promoting events in the next week, pages not in English, and links outside of the research industry (sorry, Bollywood).

 

Jeffrey Henning is the president of Researchscape International, providing custom surveys at standard prices. He volunteers with the Market Research Institute International