Respondents and engagement, two ‘issues’ being constantly debated in the research community in the last few years. One of the topics at hand is if debating ‘respondents’ in the first place isn’t discouraging people to participate in surveys because it makes them feel alienated from the whole process. I would say this may actually be one of the least of our worries: engaging, good surveys, are far more important for those who offer us a little of their time to help us doing our research. Good and bad respondents might be another topic at hand, and though I agree with the statement that everyone who sincerely tries to fill in a survey is a ‘good’ respondent, one can think about how we ended up with ‘bad’ ones in the first place. Shipping in respondents by the tens of thousands through prize offers, bizarre partners and landing pages has never sounded like the best way to get honest survey-takers in. But we might do it anyway because we need more, more, more, for all the reasons you might be able to think of.

The need for mobile research

This is where the fun of mobile Research Comes in. Because when we look at what we actually offer respondents in surveys isn’t it quite often maybe a little long, maybe a little boring and yes: a ‘little’ confusing? Now, mobile phones are not really viewed as being ideal for long texts, to say the least so any application for them tends to naturally evolve in an application that offers information in a short efficient (often graphic) way. This would immediately solve our struggle with long surveys, if we don’t fall in the trap of clients that might want to offer just that little bit more for a survey we might see as ‘too long’.

Second of all, and yes this effect will probably fade, is the inflow of new (?) people willing to take a survey. (Or participate in any other type of research) Indeed, new initiatives seem promising on this part. You may have heard of Thumbspeak, a very interesting new company that has taken the step to focus on mobile research.

We asked: “How often do you check the Thumbspeak app to look for questions?” They answered:
· Hourly – 221
· Every couple of hours – 573
· Daily – 1,350
· Weekly – 268

- ResearchWorld -

Of course we would have to see if this will stay like this, not in the last place because also 24% said that they have never (!) read a newspaper, which I personally find hard to believe. Nevertheless it seems that Thumbspeak is one of those new (with former Greenfield CEO Wiltse) companies that dares taking the step to mobile research.

A challenge will be to find clients. After all, the research industry is for, some logical and some more unclear, reasons quite traditional. And even with a wellknown CEO it is always hard to start something new. That’s probably why Thumbspeak only offers a limited set of surveys to start with now, while I suspect they would be willing to have a lot more. The fact that they’re not really filtering and directing their respondents yet to matching surveys as they hopefully will in the future can now be excused by the former fact, but has to change in the future. Nevertheless, this could perhaps one be of the most promising new concepts in the Research industry, just because they’re there and actually doing it, while others have just mentioned the possibility of mobile surveys. (Note that I’m not talking about ‘game changers’ here, everything nowadays seems to be a game changer, while hardly anything actually is.)

It will end, but why care?

In the end, the mobile web will fade, as we will not distinguish such a thing anymore by, say, 2020. The developments that will lead to the coming rise of the mobile web though, will shape the future of the entire web. If you’re asking me about what I think can really kickstart mobile research and make it valuable beyond mere ‘fun surveys’ and active respondents, check back here in a couple of days for a new article.

As the suspect can now not be prosecuted for this case, it seems like this would be the perfect example of a case that points out that you need to choose the proper tools in order to perform a task. Or maybe just that ones expectations about technological advancement are not always met.

CC-Photo: User:Avjoska

The ranking has been under attack of various Dutch marketers in the past (website in Dutch) and indeed it seems that making a ranking that everyone agrees upon is near to impossible. Even with explanations from the side of Multiscope there remained questions about certain sites being perceived as ranking either way too high or too low (in Dutch), which disappeared from those spots later on. In any case the list was much valued and debated every year, but increasingly seen as superfluous, ranking just an increasingly steady top list every year on the one hand while not listing small sites by definition, which could mean the neglect of interesting niches.

In a press release Multiscope indicates (Dutch) that the market for web-reach research has stabilised while they, have seen other activities grow. Aiming for growth, they mean to focus more on their panel and software activities and new international opportunities. Services for existing Visiscan clients will continue up to the end of this year and 2010 will also see the last of the now traditional ranking list.

#1:  It’s something online

#2: It’s new

I tweeted these two often seen misconceptions about social media and Dave Witmond replied: ‘3d largest misconception about social media: it’s social‘ . Even though I think this is a misconception indeed, I think it’s included in my two earlier statements. Stating this is pointing to the fact that people seem to believe that this new way is something that indeed new, while it isn’t. Media has always been social! As Dave responds, it’s not the ’social’ part that’s new: it’s the way of presenting it, the interface if you like.

If you’d like to point to the fact that what people seem to call social media is much faster, more interactive than everything before, you may have a point.  New technology allows for much faster, almost instant feedback, sharing and interaction, but it is not something new! The scope and the way we do it, that is what is new!

Since I wrote the initial version of this article, things have already started changing more in the general direction I’m describing here. But maybe that’s all the more reason to put it here as well. One of the nicest aspects of Foursquare is of course connecting with friends and seeing what they’re up to, but the one thing that makes it so attractive is the badges system and the fact that you can become mayor of a place. Last year, Coen Jacobs made more or less the same observation when he was putting up Brightkite against Foursquare and Gowalla. (in Dutch) This element of play makes a service like Foursquare or Gowalla something people want to keep on using: it adds a playful element of competition and it looks good as well.

Of course this is not a new idea in the world of marketing: having the consumer play, having people earn points and thus creating loyalty has been existent in different forms for a long time already. The nice thing for us here, however, is that this is an online service that is used (moslty) on mobile devices. It is perhaps one of the first really successful location based applications, although you might wonder what exactly is the goal of all this: does it have any use at all? A business model to this service may not appear to be all that clear, but this doesn’t stop the service from growing rapidly, making the first commercial initiatives to be based on this platform approach rapidly as well, and actually we’re seeing that happening right now.

Opportunities.

The fact that the play element is well used to keep people engaged and even to attract new users is of course really great, but what can Foursquare do with all these users?

The answer to this question is twofold. First there is that element of play itself: collecting badges is an incentive and it can thus be used to guide visitors to certain places. From the start Foursquare noticed this opportunity and actually used it at it’s introduction at SWXW by handing out special badges when ‘checking in’ to certain spots, venues, at this event. Imagine how cities can use this to guide tourists to certain spots, perhaps sending them to new interesting places instead of the usual hot spots! This way, cities, festivals or brands can make a Foursquare into something that actually guides the movement of people. (Of course Fsq. would earn money in this case by allowing special, custom, badges for certain places.)

Secondly there is another, maybe even simpler way of cashing in on the number of users by thinking about the venues themselves. Because if you are a frequent visitor of some place, why wouldn’t you be thinking about getting a discount, for example? With this idea in mind Starbucks is handing out custom badges as a start, but says it wants to think about using Foursquare to test ‘alternative reward strategies’.  This is indeed not all too far away from collection points or coupons somewhere or perhaps even more like collecting that sticker in your notebook!

When we realize that the internet is still changing every day and that the mobile web is really in it’s infancy then we can expect to see more and more of these new initiatives arise very quickly from now on. Location based is no longer just a nice thought, it’s really something that can be used and can be useful!

And don’t forget: don’t cheat with your checkins!

This article is loosely based on an earlier article (in Dutch) that I’ve written for marketing blog Bijgepijkerd.

One of the tools to determine your site speed, and thus if this will help your ranking, is Google Page Speed, which you can find here.

The point is that plain text emails don’t go all that well with links that go beyond just linking to a website. We’ve already seen this with email lists, but as websites want to pass more and more variables in a link for tracking and other uses, they tend to get quite long.

This mailing here even seems to obfuscate the information in the links a bit. (as I didn’t feel like figuring out what they are passing there I just blurred it all, but this is the actual extend of the links) Now, I do think that ESOMAR is giving quite decent information in the actual text of this email, the links make it almost unreadable. So yes, I think in the end the “If you cannot read this message” is applicable to me here.

What do you think: are links like these OK in plain text emails, or should we focus on the text and minimize the length of the links in such cases?

If you’re wondering how you could add a similar thing to your own website; here is a very quick walk-through. As most of it is lined out very neatly on the FB pages, I will refer to those for most part, in fact, Facebook provides you with a nice how-to here on their Like Button page.

First you will need to decide where to place the button, so open your CMS/Wordpress and find the place where you want to include code for the like button. (Usually you’d want it per post so in wordpress you have to add it per single post.)

Then you can fill in the variables on the ‘Like Button’ page Facebook has (see above) and fill in some preferences, hit ‘get code’ and you immediately get some code that you can enter at the spot that you’ve chose. (Depending on your site’s setup you will need almost no to a bit more html or php knowledge to do this in a good way.)

As you may notice you get the option of directly usable code or a single line of code that uses Facebook’s own markup language ‘XFBML’, which basically uses a Javascript library to generate the appropriate code for you.

As this latter option looks much neater I’ve chosen this one. For this you do need the code that includes the Javascript SDK, which you can find here. You will probably want to include this in your header file. After you’ve used this in your site you can easly add like buttons, boxes and more for integration with facebook by just adding single lines of code, adding a simple ‘like button’ will be as easy as adding ‘<fb:like width=”200″></fb:like>’ to your code somewhere. If you’re planning on including more FB integration, like the box on my home page, I would recommend adding this Javascript SDK in your header file, or a similar place, so you can just do the rest with simple lines of code.

Additional thoughts

Is Facebook the future? Well, this depends on how far you want to look into the future. It seems like Facebook will definitely dominate the near future, so in that sense it may be a good idea to add FB integration like this on your blog/website. However, just like me you may have nice ’social media’ integration buttons with your posts already. I’ve already got an extra retweet button, and now these like buttons to add to it?! You should be aware that it makes your page even more ‘full’ than it already is, and always be careful not to make your site the visual equivalent of a pinball game! Facebook seems like a good thing to be a bit more present than other sites, but you may want to rethink adding yet another button if you think your audience is not on Facebook to begin with.