InSites Blog

Web 2.0 platforms, social networks, online communities and mobile research are rapidly entering the marketing research landscape. In response to this media evolution ESOMAR has expanded their former Panel Research Conference to tackle these new technologies and the social environments they create, introducing the ESOMAR Online Research Conference.

Yesterday Annelies Verhaeghe, ESOMAR Young Researcher of the Year co-presented our paper on ‘Getting answers without asking questions’ with Dutch broadcaster RTL. A case on the evaluation of a TV programme based on social media. The paper will be online soon!

For more information, contact Annelies Verhaeghe.

Last week I attended the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam which was really inspiring. It was nice to hear key note speakers such as Jeff Jarvis, Andrew Keen, Chris Sacca, Bradley Horowitz, Werner Vogels, Matt Mullenweg … talking about their vision on the web. I also enjoyed the presentations of the different start-ups. It’s nice to see that there’s a 2.0 world beyond Silicon Valley and that European entrepreneurs have a platform where they can show their product and business model (although some of them still need to think about their business model and long-term sustainability in my opinion).

To me, the main takeaways of the conference were the following:

Open standards and integration
Khris Loux (JS-Kit) talked a lot about dominators of the current web, open standards and integration during the unConference on Wednesday.

The current dominators are always using the same strategy: create a platform, make sure they have a lock-in and then just dominate the space. He gave the example of Facebook who created a social networking platform where the lock-in lies in the presence of all of your friends: you just have to create an account and it’s not easy to walk away. And they are further expanding their “walled garden” via Facebook connect, a smart mechanism to enlarge their web presence and drive traffic to Facebook. Another technique that dominators use is giving a competitor’s core revenue away for free (sort of speak). For instance, Facebook could attack Google by introducing an open-source social search on their platform or by sharing a larger chunk of their advertising revenues with users.

Big companies such as Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL are wounded and need all the help they can get to fight against Google, Twitter, Facebook… So many start-ups could take advantage of this opportunity and make some deals that weren’t possible one or two years ago. Khris also gives the advice to start-ups, publishers and companies in general to not let their business model depend upon one dominant provider or service, but to work together and integrate multiple parties. If your business is built upon this dominant force, then you might be out of business soon, because typically, these dominant forces reign for 5-10 years (who knows, Facebook might not be here in 5 to 10 years anymore) until a new king arrives.

Customer centricity as business model
Werner Vogels (CTO of Amazon.com) made a plea for the customer-centric business model. Everything Amazon.com does is in the best interest of their consumers. “If you don’t focus on your consumers, they will just go elsewhere” says Werner Vogels and he continues “customers just want to buy products at the lowest price and this is not going to change in the future”.

Amazon’s model (“the flywheel”) is built on a (1) broad offering at (2) the lowest price, because it drives customer experience and traffic. The increased traffic attracts more sellers resulting in a broader offering and reduced costs enabling Amazon to lower the prices even more. And there you go, you have a flywheel.

So that’s also a reason why Amazon opened up its platform to allow other merchants to sell via Amazon.com (leads to a broader offer). Even the cloud computing services (Amazon EC2) offered to other companies are a way to have more economies of scale and further reduce costs.

Goodbye social web, hail to the MEdia
The presentation of Andrew Keen, “l’enfant terrible” of the Internet, was one of the main highlights of the next web conference.

He started his presentation by showing a painting of Johannes Vermeer (“Woman in Blue Reading a Letter”) and stating that, although the current post-industrial age is fundamentally different from the industrial age, the same rules still apply when it comes to media in general.

According to Keen, the two key principles of successful media are intimacy and trust which are depicted in the picture. When you look at the painting, you see a woman that is captivated and deeply emerged in a conversation.

The current web 2.0 industry however is flawed because it tried to replace the old media but it just left an empty space and a “cult of amateurs” (must-read book published by Keen in 2003). Most web 2.0 start-ups don’t have a long-term business model which is unforgivable in the post-industrial age (e.g. YouTube for instance).

The time has come for new MEdia whereby technology empowers the individual and not the institutions. Twitter is the final nail in the coffin of 2.0 business models. Technologies such as Twitter empower smart talented people to voice their opinion and to build a personal brand.

Googlize your business to succeed
Jeff Jarvis was also present on the next web to promote his new book “What would Google do?”. His book isn’t about his love for Google (no he even stated that he loves all of us), but how other businesses could learn from the principles Google applied. After all Google has been one of the most successful companies in the past decade, so why not investigate how they did it.

I mentioned it before in this blog post, but Jarvis also stresses the importance of integration. Instead of creating everything yourself, you should be present were the people are. So create a platform, work together with other people and think distributed. Don’t be scared to open up your platform via API’s, but give the controls to the user.

He also states that mass markets are dead and companies need to realize that we live in a world of individuals where people want to voice their opinion and where companies should offer the means to let their customers do so, in order to survive (and to learn from their consumers).

Jarvis runs through his PowerPoint presentation (link here) to show us examples of applying Google in virtually every sector. For instance, why not have lunch in a Google restaurant where you can see what other people ordered, read user reviews of the different dishes, improve the chef’s recipes, get food recommendations that match your taste…

Deal with the overload
Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress and other successful web businesses) gave an inspiring speech on the necessity to deal with the current information overload caused by the web 2.0. According to Matt, it’s impossible for an individual to absorb all the information that is present on the web and he uses a brilliant analogy to prove his point: Solomon Shereshevskii, a Russian journalist, became famous because he could literally recall every word from a speech or conversation he had with someone. Unfortunately, his “gift” also resulted in various annoying symptoms such as trouble memorizing things which weren’t literal in meaning, problems recognizing people’s faces (because of little details that changed that weren’t visible to other human beings)…

The gift of absorbing literally all the information led to many troubles which is also the case for the current state of blogs and social media. We just need better ways to digest information, to capture and restructure information.

Matt’s vision is also supported by Bradley Horowitz (VP Google Apps) who argues that the ability of a user to record his whole life online is one of the biggest challenges for Google because there’s just too much information we cannot handle. Therefore Google needs to think about metadata and context.

Some E-goistic thoughts to wrap-up this post (hey, MEdia is the key of the post-industrial age)
I thought it was pretty funny to see such a lot of Facebook bashers and Twitter adepts at the conference. For many attendees, Twitter is the next big thing and Facebook is the enemy who tries to dominate the web or replicates Twitter with his homepage redesign.

I must admit that after 3 days of twitter brainwashing I even start thinking that Twitter is the dominant force behind the world (and no, not only the world wide web). However, I came to my senses when I went to an Italian restaurant on Friday with my colleague Tom De Ruyck. I took some pictures of the things we ordered to put them on my Facebook page and the waiter asked me why I took these pictures. And I said: “I just want to share them with my friends and colleagues on Facebook”. He looked at me and said: “what is Facebook and why would you put these pictures online?”

Then I realized that during the last 3 days I was part of a mini-society that was not really representative for the Dutch population (although it’s an innovative nation according to Keen). But it was fun to be surrounded by geeks like myself with Apple laptops, individuals (em)powered by Wi-Fi and people who like to tweet once in a while every minute (and few “nitwitters” who don’t understand what all the fuzz is about).

Finally, I must congratulate the organisation of the next web conference because they did a great job: interesting key note speakers, nice networking opportunities and smoothly glued together by the hosts! I couldn’t think of a better location to hold the conference than Amsterdam: relaxed people, cosy atmosphere, good food and sunny weather. I’ll definitely see you again in 2010!

If you like to share some comments, contact me Gianni.cooreman@insites.eu

Just received great news from the ESOMAR congress committee. For the second time in two years, InSites Consulting will be presenting at the yearly ESOMAR Congress. Topic will be “The Longest Day – Cultural differences in corporate social responsibility”. So it seems that our Longest Day, the 24hours online discussion groups that we performed yesterday, isn’t over yet …. . The congress will take place in Montreux on 15-18  September. We’ll keep you posted!

56 hours to go until the official start of our challenge! We are all quite nervous & excited. 
For us moderators, the challenge relates to mind as well as to body. That is why we are preparing to postpone the wake-up moment…

Below you can see a picture of us @ work in sleep mode, in slow transition to the work mood. This initiative was also helpful to get used to colleagues dressed in pyjamas. In fact, we were all surprised to find out that this outfit changed our ‘work’ experience, as if a Zen atmosphere was evoked… I am all for it!

In 9 days, we will be chatting with people from all over the world for 24 hrs in a row.

I can hardly wait to jump from one country into the next; it really is an international rollercoaster! A global discussion about corporate social responsibility, getting ideas from around the world in one day – ten years ago, people would’ve thought we’re crazy. (Perhaps we still are, a little bit)

But, no time to daydream, some practical arrangements have high priority!

Today, we are sending a confirmation email to our participants. For this project, we want them to be as much involved as possible. That is why we frequently communicate with them before the actual sessions. We introduce ourselves (the members of the qualitative research team) & we give them an idea of where we will be sitting (a ‘real’ hold for a virtual event).

We hope they are thrilled to participate!

Luckily, we can rely on excellent experiences from the past, as well as from participants as from clients. Check out their testimonials on http://connectedresearch.insites.eu/clients-heinz.aspx

Anyway, back to work now! I’ve got to finalize our topic guide for the sessions …

Hello!

Yes, you are not mistaken, we will travel the world in 24h and we will do this from Wednesday March 25th 5 pm (GMT+1) until Thursday March 26th 5 pm (GMT +1).
InSites Consulting is always up for a challenge, so the sky is definitely not the limit here! 

How will InSites Consulting do this?

Since we believe in online research and we have a variety of online research tools available, we have everything that is needed to actually do what we aim for: get into contact with the whole world. We will recruit participants from all over the world for twelve 2-hour long online discussion groups, in which we will talk and discuss the same topic with people in a different timezone, thus going from Eastern Europe to Western Europe, America, Australia all the way to China and back in Western Europe.

The topic of the online discussion groups: CSR

While Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is high on the agenda of companies, little is understood about what CSR does to brands and how brands should deal with it. Given the more empowered role of today’s consumer, we believe there is no dividing line between brand management and CSR. Companies shouldn’t make CSR part of their brand strategy unless they are walking the talk. And that is exactly why we want to focus on CSR in the online discussion groups.

The project set-up and recruitment

The qualitative research consultants will moderate the sessions in different teams from ‘Living tomorrow‘ in Vilvoorde (Brussels, Belgium).
So far, the consultants, together with the Talk2Change team, have been focussing on recruitment of the participants. Quite a challenging job: struggling with time zones, finding the adequate amount of persons to participate to each of the 12 sessions,…but everything is going fine. Up next is the creation and fine-tuning of the topic guide with all the questions we would like to ask to the participants.

We have already had participant reactions and they are really enthusiastic to take part in this new and challenging experience.

“I’m very glad to be selected to participate in the talk to change chat around the world on the 25th of March” (Lutgarde)

And like the participants, we are really looking forward to the whole experience…

If you want to find out more about Connected Research at InSites Consulting, feel free to visit our connected research website

We will regularly post new updates on the Longest Day experience via this blog.

Hear you soon

Sofie and the other qualitative team members

Last week I visited MOA’s afternoon session on online qualitative market research, together with 2 colleagues of mine who are also into the topic. It had promised to be a very inspiring afternoon on the future of (this domain within) research with speakers like Pieter Willems (PW/Next), Marja Ruigrok (Ruigrok/Netpanel), Stefan Peters (Intomart/Gfk) and last but not least Frank Geers (InSites Consulting) and Ronald Laan (Heinz Europe).

Of course, we saw how focus groups are done online with richer insights and less social bias (… and in a more cost-efficient way) through ‘online discussion groups’  in the Heinz case . But most of all, the speeches made me think about some fundamental changes ‘online’ and ‘the 2.0 phenomenon’ are causing to the backbone of (qualitative) marketing research. Here are some of my reflections of the past days:

- Qualitative is definitely coming out of its’ niche: having qualitative feedback from consumers and constantly feeling the heartbeat of the market is more important than ever for companies. The relationship we have with our research participants evolves into an ongoing online dialogue between them and a company. Facilitated through us, the research agency.
- Qualitative – traditionally conducted on smaller samples – can now easily be done on larger samples of e.g. 200 people (because of the cost and time efficiency of the online data collection method), this allows an additional more quantitative analysis on data who are qualitative from nature. Leading to new and richer insights. Allowing people to put post-its with emotions and comments on a concept, billboard or leaflet and looking at those hundreds of data points from an aggregated level is a nice example. Next to that we have online research communities on which hundreds or even thousands of participants are active, resulting into a huge amount of qualitative (posts, short comments, discussions …) and quantitative data (polls, ratings, positive or negative reactions, surveys …).
- Qualitative data is not only collected via interviews and discussions anymore. It’s also scraped from natural conversations on the internet and analyzed via text mining. To say even more, the data are not only textual anymore. Pictures, videos … – both published and mined on the public internet or on research blogs or foray – are rich information sources for researchers and ethnographers.
I believe that text mining or semantic analysis can have added value to more traditional ways of qualitative analysis: interpreting the data from an aggregated/group point of view, unveiling (hidden patterns in) emotions, being able to search for differences between profiles in a quick manner …  It will lead to an ultimate blurring between quantitative and qualitative research. While e.g. bulletin boards and the generated information (text) are qualitative in the traditional sense of the word, semantic analysis adds quantitative flavor to findings. There is a shift here in the level of analysis from the participant to the information chunks they generated and the association patterns between them.

 But there is more besides this ‘fusion’ between qualitative and quantitative research, between interviewing and observing in online and offline contexts.
Some dogmas of the research profession are coming under pressure, probably leading to a whole new research paradigm:

- Research, although a serious thing and task, needs to become more fun and engaging for the participants. By the type of tasks we gave and by making every step of the research process more transparent.
- Research does not have to take ‘hours’ anymore for participants. It may definitely be a group of shorter and more spread data collection moments which are aggregated at a certain moment in time. We are moving from ‘ad hoc’ towards ‘always on’ research participants who participate to a specific task when they feel like it, how much and long they want and through the device they prefer. Powerful analysis tools will be needed to interpret and combine all the collected data in a fast and meaningful way: combinations of different analysis methods in order to unveil all hidden ‘diamonds’ in these huge amounts of qual-quant data.
- We all know that playing on intrinsic motivation (giving feedback, making research participants in crowd to the research subject) becomes a need, but due to the rise of the social internet, also ‘social motivation’ becomes important. Knowing what other participants are doing, seeing how many people already participated and how many of them agree or disagree … This will definitely bring in questions on anonymity and privacy issues. What are the consequences of giving up participants’ anonymity on data quality and response rates? How far may or can we go in this? It’s something we are currently researching together with Stephan Ludwig, the Unimaas Phd student we sponsor.
Next to that, what is the relevance of homogenized research groups in this new research world? Do we still need it? Or will data be richer when we use heterogeneous groups of participants due to the empowerment of today’s consumer?
- Research should also be spontaneous instead of just triggered. Reactions, feedback on products may come into a research community spontaneously, just like it pops-up on a natural community. Participants should have the ability to drop ideas directly to a company through their dedicated research community.
- And finally, research does not have to take place in a ‘lab’ environment anymore. We have to do online research – or offer participants invites for it – were they are online: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter … these new online media are definitely the new e-mail!

Exciting times are lying in front of us, that’s for sure! Conclusion of Peter Zegwaart, the session chair: “Online qualitative is definitely not a gimmick. To say even more, it has the ability to reshape our industry drastically in the forthcoming years!”

MOBILE RESEARCH CONFERENCE ‘09 – London, 16 & 17 February

One thing is for sure, mobile research is one of the youngest domains in market research and a common language to discuss issues is still a bit lacking. However, in this article I will give an overview of the different possibilities and sub methods that are available right now. Next to that, I tried to summarize the pro’s and con’s of this ‘new’ methodology. For sure there are opportunities to take research forward, but we need to be critical to ourselves and not use the method because it’s new and fancy. In the near future we (at InSites Consulting ForwaR&D Lab) will start-up some pilot projects to explore the advantages and possible benefits of mobile surveys, discussions and observations. Of course I will keep you posted on this!

Let’s jump into the content…

No such thing as a free lunch…

There are different sub methods within the mobile research category: CATI among mobile-only consumers (which is not really ‘new’ of course), spoken surveys with voice recording (very niche), SMS enabled mobile surveys and mobile web enabled mobile surveys. I will tell you more about the last two.

First of all, when looking at mobile surveys you need to take into account that only a limited number of questions can be asked. Up to 5 for SMS enabled surveys (because it’s only one question per SMS that can be answered) and not more than 15 when it comes to mobile web questionnaires. Moreover, open-ended questions can only be asked once or twice in a project because of the drop-out this type of questions cause when applied to mobile.

If it comes to barriers for participants to take part in mobile surveys, the two main dimensions – besides having a mobile device that enables the needed functionalities (and software like Java) – are the ‘cost’ for taking part (the SMS communication or the cost for up- and downloading bites in the case of web enabled mobile surveys) and having the ‘skills’ to work with the mobile device easily, so the ability to fill out such a survey.

Also in terms of sampling you need to be careful. 55+ is under represented among mobile surfers and even (but less) among SMS users. Especially youngsters are heavy users of SMS and mobile web has a higher penetration among business people. Of course, this are two hard to reach target groups for which mobile surveying could be a great alternative.

If we compare both methods (SMS and mobile web surveys), we can definitely say that for participants it is far easier to take an SMS questionnaire than a mobile web one. Drop-out in mobile web surveys sometimes even reaches up to 85% (one third of this participants because it was the first time they used the web functionality on their phone). But the biggest issue with mobile web is that the penetration is very low at this point in time, which makes it a rather niche application at this point. It could, for example, be interesting for researching youngsters. But only, if you provide them with the device and give them a free mobile contract during the period of the project. ‘Free’ that’s the keyword, because even in the case of SMS surveys participants do not want to pay, although loads of people participate in TV voting at much higher cost.

New opportunities… and challenges!

An opportunity for mobile research lies in the fact that the majority of today’s mobile phones give respondents the ability to take and send through pictures and even videos about specific moments in their life and this almost in real time. This enables auto-ethnography and… ‘day-in-a-life’ studies become richer due to the detailed time stamp.

In terms of sampling, using online panel members seems to be the most common practice next to using client databases. One of the future challenges will be to convince online panel members to subscribe for a mobile panel too!

Current applications of mobile research

Over looking all the practical cases presented, we may conclude that mobile research is especially useful when conducting ‘moment of truth research’: researching behavior, feelings and context during ‘shopping for’ or ‘consuming/using a’ specific product or service. Some examples: measuring customer experience during an event or festival, capturing felt emotions while watching a TV show,… Another application is brand awareness tracking of the sponsoring of brands directly after – for example – a soccer play. Research results of comparisons with online surveys show that awareness is far more accurate if you conduct the research directly after the match. The ability to catch emotions and behavior in the moment is the biggest USP of mobile research (more than 2/3 of the responses are gathered within 3 hours). Next to that there is the ability to capture to moment in a picture and send it to the researchers. But still, traditional online research of extended profiles of panel members are needed to have all the necessary data (age, gender,… and extra questions).

Geography Research!?

Google recently launched its location based mobile conversations software ‘Latitude’. One of the cases presented by an Estonian professor used a similar technique to follow participants’ movements and draw conclusions from that. Next to it, they used location based mobile ‘push’ surveys and triggered ‘pull’ questionnaires to collect additional information from the respondent: what he or she is doing at the moment, with whom, what are the emotions felt, which conversations are going on,… The question is of course how respondents will react to these kind of (new) practices!

The future is bright, the future is ‘fusion’!

Another vision that came across several times was that the future will be about integrating mobile into larger online research platforms like dedicated community platforms. Despite this, easy to use and set-up mixed mode platforms like Twitter (mobile and web) seems to be rather unexplored at this moment in time, although penetration is booming and the fact that it could give an extra qualitative flavor to mobile research.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating

One of the keynote speakers was Liz Nelson, 70 years old and to put it short the founding N in TNS and now one of the pioneers in mobile market research with here company QInsights. Next, to a visionary and passionate speech on the future of our industry (in which she definitely showed to be very up-to-date with the latest trends in the market) she asked us to dare and to dive into this domain of market research to explore it. In order to make it a mature methodology as soon as possible. And that is exactly what we will do from tomorrow on J.

By Dado Van Peteghem and Wim de Wever.

Last week, on the 5^th of February, we headed to the centre of Amsterdam for a social media congress with a strong content focus on communities. The event took place in a creative workspace called the ‘Westerunie’, an old gas plant, where about 300 people gathered for the 3^rd Social Strategy Talk. Due to some train connection delays we missed the appetizers, but we managed to arrive right on time for the content part, hooray for the taxidriver!

Only a few minutes after we found a place the first speaker, Peter Kentie (Marketing Manager at PSV) was given the floor after a small introduction of the organizing team.
Peter Kentie gave interesting viewpoints on the strategy of PSV and how they’re using cross medial tools to connect with their different target groups. Every new technology/medium that rises can turn out to be a new opportunity for the most famous football club from Eindhoven. These different, self managed, (online, mobile) media however, are strongly rooted in the offline world. Moreover the brand influence in the success of these communities plays an important role.

Peter Kentie: “Football players and coaches are passing by, the real power comes from the brand PSV”

It is obvious that not every community member (read: supporter) is at the same level in terms of involvement, and therefore, PSV wants its members to push upwards in their self-created ‘participation ladder’.

The second speaker, Ruud Smeulders from Rabobank, threw a light on the online initiatives of Rabobank and crowd sourced the public with the open ended question: ‘How should Rabobank make use of communities?’ Some interesting ideas, like P2P loaning, came up during the following discussion and provided a lot of inspiration for Ruud Smeulders. The most interesting point of his speech for the audience was the insight that the difference between the employee and customer is actually fading away. But the best was yet to come…

The most inspiring speech on the usage of new Media & Technologies in community building was held by Roderick Vanhögen, better known as the Podcast Priest. Every morning Father Roderick brings his daily breakfast-podcast to the online spheres, inspiring people and followers around the globe. In a kind of daring way, he succeeds in turning an outdated looking ‘product’, being the church, into an attractive environment. He’s bringing together kindred spirits in a virtual church with a massive turnout. Keeping at the back of one’s mind the necessary and enduring connection between the community members, being the same religious message.

The last speaker of the day, Kirsten Verdel, shared her experiences on communities from a campaigning point of view. As a vital link in the campaigning team of Barack Obama, she told a story of preparation for years to win the presidential elections in the USA. Mission, Man and Money were key in the Democratic campaign, but patently obvious, the first of the 3 M’s was essential. Obama (and his grassroots support) is a Man who can bring the Mission in such a convincing way that only few would be able to match. Financial support of the electorate was necessary to spread the Mission to the public, but both Man and Money are only restoratives of the central message.Crucial in the strategy of the Democrats was not only to bind possible voters, but to go further and really convince the community of their joining. From that point, voters would not be simply voters anymore, but real messengers, towards other potential electorate. Offering the necessary tools in order to facilitate this process was indispensable.

Afterwards we had a nice chat with Carl Lens, one of the organizers of the event, about online communities and research aims with interesting food for thought.

Conclusion:

We’ve seen a growing interest for communities in a large variety of business sectors, both for off- and online purposes and hence the opportunities and difficulties to merge both worlds.

Although it was a rainy day, we gathered some bright inspirations for the future !

According to comScore it is! This week they announced that there are now more than 1 billion (1.000.000.000) internet users online. Well, maybe not online right now, at the same time, and certainly not all visiting our website, but still.