Not Panels, It's Engagement!

Microsoft today unveiled the Deepfish browser for mobile devices.

Frankly I find this of great interest in research terms. Ok I have been banging on for a while about how panels and research will utilise mobile phone technology very soon and location based awareness is the key app for insight. If we have a mobile browser which is stable and potentially a seemless adoption experience from what we see in the current browser space then we have potential for growth.

New insights, mobile surveys, immediate recall, location based awareness and tracking. Mash ups with Google Earth. Reaching the social networkers. Reaching the mobile generation.

There is a lot of focus these days on the use of customer immersion (a specific phenotype of ethnographic work).

The panel is the way to deliver just this type of solution. And that solution is a key part of the open source NPD process as we move forwards.

Recruit and pinpoint customer
Connect to customer
Immerse with the customer
Fuse needs and frustrations across a SWIS (See What I See) platform
Engage multiple disciplines
Shake, aggregate, cook, and away you go. A beautiful cake. But not any old Cake. A cake which has three facets to its creation:

A new market definition
A product and service upgrade
A change in process & business model

Now that is a innovative cake borne out of engagement. Does it taste any good? Sure and it is a unique sensory experience.

I am off. Want to taste it now....

As researchers we have a certain amount of knowledge. Some of us more than others. But we don't know what we don't know. And this is the same in all professions and business services.

So my point is surely the way to deliver insights is to open up to other disciplines. And the panel infrastructure provides a large part of the approach to doing that. Ok, so involving marketers or advertising executives is hardly new. But what about engineers? Graphic Designers? IT? Linguists? Philosophers? Sociologists? Isn't that fusion? Could we fail not to move forwards on our thinking?>

And the song? Oh that was just something in my head at the time. Remember it..?

That got your attention.

One of the things that the Wisdom of Crowds make us understand is that in market research we should be concerned about a) our sample sizes and b) the quality of the aggregation of the wisdom from that sample. Well ok, maybe nothing new.

But in Interactive qualitative this is new. The idea that we can use a larger sample size is worth looking at because it is now possible technologically and financially. So when we do NPD work is this not something to consider?

Now we go a step further. If we have respondents and the end-client build a virtual stock market on the ideas that are generated would this not lead to a good level of prediction? Would it not be engaging for the participants and also draw the client in to the process?

Let's buy that disruptive technology or idea stock now. The market opens 9am tomorrow morning....

In the old world a hierarchy set the direction. A team had a clear structure, a beginning and an end. In the new world we can only accelerate engagement through collaboration where the tone and the direction is set and the network produces the ideas and the creation. For mutual benefit.

The old world was military style. The new world is the Jazz ensemble.

See you in New Orleans...

Sorry I have been sick recently. Now the Mac is back...


Old panels were about permission. Sign people up (as many as possible and even be less than honest as to how many have signed up in some cases). The tried and trusted argument was that the permission from panelists led to a greater anticipation of the survey contact leading to a) higher response rates and b) more attention from the panelists. This led to better data quality...

This is simple to gain traction with when the alternative is interruption telephone.

No wonder that we are bogged down with arguments about SOI / DOI / TOI (Sorry - for those who really have been somewhere on Mars recently - double opt in). But what in reality does DOI mean anyway? Ok permission is a tick box. Done and dusted. But is that equal to an engaged participant?

Let's move to appointments with our permission panelists. Higher response rates and shorter field times. Better engagement. Co-creation. Can I e-mail you on Tuesday morning with your new survey if I have one available?

See you in 30 minutes. I have a survey to complete. No calling please.