Whenever people asked what it was that I meant by “doing Social Research”, I could talk passionately for an hour. But sometimes it became apparent that a more structured approach was needed. After all, speaking in a passionate way about something you have in your mind might not always get the message across in a clear way. Thus I developed a way of structuring my talks.

I think my main argument for both how Social Research is possible and why it could be useful can be summarized in three main points. I’ve used these three points from then onwards to structure my approach when talking about this issue, which seems to work fine for me now. I’ve made a slide show based on these three main points, which may be nice to share with you here. Read the rest of this entry »

Following the recent acquisitions in the research industry, think about Toluna buying Greenfield Online/Ciao Surveys, one would expect a response from other players in the market. And to be a bit more specific; what would smaller players in the market do with their panels? There are several obvious solutions to the troubles of maintaining smaller panel(s), one could thing about an advanced sharing system or outsourcing panels.

As all of these seem to be happening there is the other obvious solution to which I’ve been pointing several times in the past; several companies ‘chipping in’ together and combine their panel efforts. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever taken a survey recently, or maybe several surveys? If so you might have wondered about several things. And maybe those things are exactly those things that bother me about surveys. One could have, of course, something against surveys altogether, but they remain a powerful research tool, that is one thing that’s for sure. Even though I’m personally calling for a broader way of doing research, I don’t think we should abandon it.

I do think we should look more into some of the things that come to mind when you look at a survey. These things are often related to a certain tradition that lies in doing survey based research and indeed in a sort of tradition that is created per tracker survey as well. Not changing things for tradition’s sake, is one of the worst things a researcher could do and still this seems to happen all too often. Survey methodology in general is one thing, but a lot of me wondering about survey research is the lack of changes, of innovation.

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Text-analytics on data present on the internet, in a way a sort of quantitative way of doing research that is traditionally qualitative seems to hold a lot in store for research. But despite the fact that this is actually one of my personal favorites for the future of Market Research, little seems to really take off. Sure there are talks about doing research on twitter, but very few real efforts have been made or at least way less than one would maybe expect. For now most of marketing efforts seem to regard online communities as just another advertising space, but things slowly start to change.

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I already wrote about the KOPTE model, that defines 5 basic factors that are of influence the success of your social network. I’ve tried to explain what each of the five points means and how this can work in practice. But how does it work in practice? What does it mean if you apply each of those five points to your (Social Network) organisation?

It is nice to see that someone has actually done just that. (Based on a Dutch article I wrote about this model earlier this year.) In the professional case “Working open source”, the five point model I described is used to analyze the open source business model of ZXZW. (An annual festival in “celebration of independent culture”) Read the rest of this entry »

A while ago I tweeted about a weblog that criticizes some of the online research that is being done. And I would say: the author has every right to do so! Because making a survey seems easy: it certainly isn’t.

With all the research professionals that are out the one would think that things can’t be all that bad, but the weblog “Bad Research: No Biscuit” shows that there are still a lot of things that are questionable to say the least. Anonymous research professional “researchrants” describes some of his worst research experiences.

I’ve highlighted some of the problems that “Researchrants” talks about, on the Dutch online marketingblog “Bijgespijkerd”. If you can read Dutch, or are not afraid to use google translator, you can find it here.