Not Panels, It's Engagement!

At the end of each year (like you) I plan for the next. It is a time to relax and think, as opposed to stress and do! So Merry Christmas from Sydney where I have relocated for ten days or so. I had forgotten just how wonderful a place it was. Anyway on with the show...

What are you planning for 2007? It seems that engagement / mash-up / web-services co-creation / customer voice / inside innovation are the obvious 2007 currency. It is just a question of what form(s) that takes. This is a truly exciting time to be a researcher - has there ever been a better time? There is no greater buzz than self-expression.

Three things that I am playing with are:

- co-support panels like the concept used by CISCO (mention them a lot) for customer self-help

- wikiresearch (Watch this space)

- the Wisdom of Crowds (more to follow)

I was once lucky enough to listen to Ray Poynter - many years ago. He said something very profound about Cookies. Well Ray - hopefully I can reciprocate and give you some Cookies in return!

Thank you. Here is his Blog http://thefutureplace.typepad.com/

(That presentation was in Milton Keynes in the UK. Interesting place).

Market research and marketing are undergoing change. No big deal in saying that. Personally I am always fascinated by changes - or more to the point how to accelerate them. It doesn't matter what you do there will always be 15% who really go for it, 70% who are not going for it yet and 15% who claim they will never do it.

Anyone can talk a great game - but it is the behaviour that matters. What do people actually do? And does that embrace the change? We all have our own reasons for pushing or pulling on something: career enhancement, money, challenge, boredom, to be trendy, an easier life - maybe even all of these in some matrix combination?

The secret I think is to identify that top 15% and proactively drive them. That will lead to some osmosis. You need to demonstrate to them either:

- the ability to see the light
- the feeling of the heat

CISCO drive any new initiative by delivering through the framework of Leadership, Competence, Technology and Governance. Once these blocks are in place you can drive it through. That has always stuck with me.

Then the considerations are micro - what is the advantage to me of the new initiative in my day to day level work?

And you can be sure that this is potentially the biggest issue for business as we move forwards. Change will accelerate and those who can LEAD change will win. You must take people with you - only then can you accelerate change.

Anyway - I am off to accelerate Engagement...

Seasons Greetings to you. And all that. May your god go with you as the great and now departed Dave Allen used to say.

I was reading this article today, based on the current Nextgen Web Marketing Conference in 2006.

Are we at internet 3.0? 2.0? 2.5? Geez, who knows? Does it really mean anything anyway? Surely these terms come about precisely because we restricted our initial views of what the internet (presumably 1.0) was all about in the first place?

3.0 /2.5 is supposed to stand for device independent websites, mass-customisation of websites, greater customer relevance and interaction as well as collaboration.

Didn't Peppers & Rogers write about this in a One-to-One future many years ago? Haven't many organisations been doing some of this anyway for some time? Isn't customer orientation what early pioneers of the internet had in mind, so we are simply executing this in a new way?

It's great that we are moving on...but where was our starting point? Are we not restricting our horizons?

It seems that this commentary on 2.0, 2.5, 3.0 in some way mimics the technology shift of 2G, 3G, 4G and so on. Well that would make sense. Let's use those terms to describe our internet where a new technology or capability is involved - but not when we simply have a new trendy concept - which has always been around anyway.

It is self evident today that everyone talks about a participatory web - insight 2.0, conversations, engagement, storytelling, storypushing, dialogue. Should I go on?

Well as technology shifts and our cultural and social appraisals also shift of how we use and apply that same technology it seems obvious to me that the last great leap forwards comes from uniting minds - the principle that many people are better than one (or even just a few people).

So today I saw that a new search engine is launching called ChaCha. A human powered search engine that has the intelligence of the human mind allied to the database reach of technology. That is a hard to match combination.

So we have Wikipedia for knowledge....

We have ChaCha for search....

When will we have ParticipantFusion for marketing research....?

Heh - even the US and Russia can work together now. I saw it on the NASA tracker for the Space Shuttle - that means any of us can work together!

One of the key advances of the enlightenment project was mapping the world. Cartography became a science and a geometric view of the world steadily gave birth to uniformities of time and space.

So now that we have mapped our earth we can also map space. We can even map the orbit of the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle orbiterhttp://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/tracking/index.html .

If we can do this how easy will it be to track human locations? And once we track locations using the "Buddy Beacon" or whatever it becomes the consequences will be large.

Will there be such a thing as a fugitive any more? Do we need to do day after recall? Can we get feedback and dialogue at specific locations and points in a process? Yes, you would have to say that from a marketing (and research) perspective this is almost a given. Don't call us - we will call you. I just left the store and I have something to say.....reverse research.

Consumer = Prosumer.
Respondent = Correspondent......

..These days we seem to focus on the panel so much. The way to deliver the research. This has allowed many new players to come to the market who are not from a research background. Of course the low barriers to entry and the nature of the internet make this a very attractive option.

However can the panel concept only be optimised through research knowledge?

What about quality of sampling?
What about the questionnaire on-line design?
What about the survey itself (it is a website after all). Does that require research optimisation?
What about data quality optimisation?
What about the insights themselves?
What about the way the panel is managed from a research perspective?

I don't see ISO looking at these things? I don't see ESOMAR looking at these things? Yet the truth is that a panel has little intrinsic value in its own right. It's what you do with it that adds value .

I say let's stop obsessing on recruitment and panels in isolation from the way the panel is used and the quality of research thinking that goes into building, maintaining and using it.

Is that dialectical thinking? Maybe Marx does have a place!

..I read in the Sydney Morning Herald this morning that the Australian Parliament is considering a Report which would enable speeches to have visual representation by using PowerPoint platforms.

Now whilst this might be considered bringing the 'debate' out of the stone age, I wonder if they have considered leaping beyond .ppt and going to Flash, Avatars and the like in their speech reporting?

Would this take the soundbyte to new heights? Would the PR spin doctors not have further food to throw with? It would be more engaging for sure - but let's not adopt a linear way of thinking like Marx - then leapfrog .ppt and go one better to ensure real democracy.

Would this not allow us to reconnect with the Youth?

..Sometimes one just has to shut up, listen and take notice. (Actually we don't do enough of this in my opinion).

I read this on Seth's Blog today. Long been one of my inspirations. It provides a summary of performance and of what engagement is all about

Read it - "I would be a lousy pilot".

Thank you Seth.

Enough said.

Ok, so we have internet research using on-line panels. We have on-line surveys. We even have on-line discussion now (finally after years of naysaying).

How else can we use the internet? Well some of them are in this blog. But I had some other perspectives.

- These days we talk about dissemination of reports through client portals and the like. Great! However this is not very Interactive is it? Is there any wonder that numerous esteemed colleagues are debating about their use and uptake except in certain exceptional circumstances? The point is I think that aside from content we tend to have no reason to view these reports. Now in our world design counts for a great deal. Maybe if we made the reports more Interactive people would actually use them far more? Sure content is King, but design is the Prince. Let's not forget that. So we have internet research, internet panel, internet portal AND internet format reports and presentations - .ppt show me the way to go home!

- Will we ever have a virtual interviewer? The advantages of this could be quite neat in terms of engagement, but we would need to be careful since one of the advantages of the internet is the anonymity (or at least perception)

- Using the internet to capture real sound in real - time and immediate availability to client desktop. Is that not more diagnostic? So simple and yet so impactful.

More later....

When people talk about panels they always end up talking about or referring to panel size as some metric of the health of the panel:

My panel is better because it is bigger
We are further ahead - ours is bigger...

Since when has size really made much difference? Don't get me wrong size can help in quality sampling, but let's be honest there are very few people out there who really know sampling theory and practice. Indeed, many of the new panels are proud to say that they are not run by researchers! Says it all I think...

But size is just one factor. You don't judge a cricket team only by its batting line up (sorry England) you must look at the component parts like fielding, team spirit, bowling and so on. And so with panels you must look at effective response rates, core-cooperators, panel composition, survey demand, tracking frequency and so on.

Maybe this is all too hard - it's just easier to outsource...

Last week I was in Korea. Korea is always a challenge. If you want to visit a place that typifies how the world is changing right now this is the place. The energy, the drive, the dynamism is everywhere.

Just a couple of thoughts for today:

- I have seen a few articles recently about Virtual panels . Now in internet terms this is a great concept. Expand the scope of your panel through partnerships and affiliates so that you can deliver well nigh on almost anything in sample terms. However let's take a closer look. Who are the partners? Are there validations of representation? So in research terms there are some key questions to be considered. Was this not what ESOMAR best practice was designed to do? Did we not sign up for these things?

- We have TRUSTe for Privacy. What do we have for panel transparency? Yes we have a code that declares 'I have a managed panel too!' Isn't this like asking a lobby to self-regulate? What auditing mechanism do we actually have? In reality.

- This next entry is taken from Christensen's ideas on innovation. Whilst we all take our panels into new directions - communities, engagement, virtual and so on what happens to those client's who just want the stock interviews and data collection? Our technological achievements and thinking will certainly outpace the client demand - will there be tiered offerings in this regard to counter that inherent contradiction?