The Future Place Blog

Six Trends that are Changing the World

Wired Magazine have published 6 trends that they claim are driving the global economy. These trends are:

• People Power, peer-to-peer systems, open source, sharing and reference systems are creating new sucesses and dooming others to failure, for example the 80 million who use MySpace and the 40 million who bloggers.
• Video Unlimited, PC screens and mobiles are beginning to eclipse televisions as the primary viewing medium, and downloading (not to mention uploading) is replacing passively receiving broadcast media.
• Personalize It, we all know about the way Amazon and Yahoo will personalise your contact with them, but beyond that Addidas will customise your shoes, Abbey will put your images in your debit card, and in pharmaceuticals doctors are increasingly able to use DNA tests to prescribe drugs that will suit you better than the average.
• Carbon Killers, Wired notes that the way the market is moving towards a greener hue. They speculate that regulation may not even be necessary, with companies such as Toyota and BP leading the way, and General Electric planning to invest US$1.5 billion a year into clean technologies – about 50% of its R&D budget.
• Buy It Now, historical approaches to R&D are beginning to give way to large companies accelerating their progress by buying companies that develop promising ideas. This idea has always been around, but what is changing is the scale, and small to medium size companies seem keen to put themselves on the auction block.
• All-Access Economy, based on open-standards, renting software rather than buying it, using infrastructures to facilities new businesses, such as those who use eBay as a platform for their developing businesses.

Are we going to see a two-speed Internet?

Battle lines are being drawn between the users of the Internet, from humble bloggers (if that is not an oxymoron) through to the heavyweights such as Google. On the other side are the people who operate the machinery of the Internet, in particular the telcos (telecommunication companies). The telcos have long wanted to be able to charge more for carrying more valuable traffic, and to be able to charge a premium to people who wanted their traffic to travel faster or to be prioritised. The contest is about a principle referred to as network neutrality (or simply net neutrality), something www.savetheinternet.com refers to as the First Amendment of the Internet (in the United States Constitution the First Amendment is a clause that protects the freedom of speech).

As the New Scientist pointed out this week, this argument is related to a less visble issue, who will pay to upgrade the Internet? At the moment the structure of the Internet is beginning to creak and groan under the massively escalating levels of traffic. As more uses are found for streaming media and for linking more people together, the congestion will only worsen.

At the moment the telcos make their money by charging for the amount of data that travel along their wires and cables. In the US laws meant that ISPs had to give equal access to all users, without prioritising some traffic or some sites over others. But a June 2005 US Supreme Court decision meant that this protection does not necessarily extend to things like broadband cable connections.

What the people who campaign for net neutrality fear is that telcos will divide the Internet into fast and slow lanes. To access the fast lane websites would have to pay more, as might users. There is also a fear that telcos could use these techniques to block traffic that was competitive with them, for example telcos could inhibit the growth of free, peer-to-peer Internet phone calls.

Big money is being spent by the telcos to lobby for less regulation, whilst on the other side names as famous as Tim Berners-Lee are calling for the enshrining of net neutrality. Recently the US House of Representative rejected an amendment that would have protected net neutrality. The battle has now moved to the US Senate.

MRS Online Conference a Sucess

The MRS one day Conference held on June 27, at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in London was a resounding success. The event was sold out, with 25 more on the waiting list (the event will be re-run in October).

Chairman Pete Comley (pictured) of Virtual Surveys put together a programme that included leading lights from the panel world including George Terhanian (Harris Interactive), Darren Noyce (SKOPOS), John Caldwell (Research Now!), and Richard Thornton (Ciao) to discuss the issues surrounding using online panels. This session was enhanced by GMTV's Miranda Maguire giving a client's perspective on builing a bespoke panel and well researched paper by Martin Oxley (TNS) looking at at panel conditioning. The consensus was that panels are now widely accepted, are growing fast and will become a dominant, or the dominant, medium.

In the afternoon the conference explored the world of participatory media, the role of blogs, the innovations of WOM (Word of Mouth) and how all this links to research, with papers from Nick Watkins and Graeme Trayner.

Graeme Trayner (pictured left), of Brunswick Group LLP, explored the growth in participatory media. The way that citizens are becoming photo journalists and the way that blogs and phenomena such as MySapce are growing illustrate that many people are no longer content to just be passive absorbers of other people's media, they want to input to that process. Graeme went on to challenge the sustainability of a research approach based on the researcher being in control and the customer or citizen being treated like a lab rat, being told which quesitons to answer, being told what answers they could give, being corrected when they give responses that do not match the researchers template. The future of reseach will need to be more democratic and will have to find ways for people to take ownership of some elements of the process.

Nick Watkins (pictured left), Managing Director of GfK-NOP Financial Decision then brought many of the topics covered by Graeme Trayner in sharp relief by describing a project where he had used blogs to allow people to describe the lengthy process of arranging a mortgage (a presentation originally given at this year's MRS Conference). Nick showed how blogs can be used to create a diary type environment that allowed people to record and capture the highs and lows of working through the mortgage process. Amongst the questions was one from a client about cost savings. The consensus view of the people who had used blogs for reasearch was that it might be the cheapest way of answering a difficult questions, but it is not a cheap solution. The amount of work required by the researcher to monitor the blogs, to create engaging emails and to keep everything moving is significant, but the insight is rewarding.

The session was then rounded off with a short presentation by Ray Poynter (The Future Place and Virtual Surveys) who posed four questions about the future of research which were then explored via syndicate working and reported back in a plenary session. Finally, the delegates retired to the bar to discuss the finer points over a glass of wine.

What were Ray's key conclusions of the day?

• There is going to be much more coalescence between CRM and market research.
• We have had 10 years of change, but we are probably going to have 20 more years of change, and the change will accelerate.
• Blogs and WOM will continue be the hot research topic for the next year.
• Panels have moved passed the early adopter stage and are now an everyday essential part of business.
• Commodity research is getting cheaper and will keep getting cheaper.

Using blogs for online qual

The latest innovation in online qualitative research is to use bespoke blogs to conduct research. Pete Comley, Chairman of Virtual Surveys, presented the technique at a breakfast seminar in London 20th June, to an audience of about 50 client companies.

Pete showed how blogs can be created, using a simplified interface, in a way that works to engage the interest of the respondents, and allows the respondents to read comments, make comments, upload images, and interact with the moderator and other respondents in a number of ways. Pete showed how RSSOwl can be used to analyse the various interactions and feedback.

Virtual Surveys proposes to use Blogs as a addition to other more traditional techniques, rather than as a replacement.

What is an RSS Marketing Strategy

A really interesting e-consultancy post looks at the marketing strategy that should determine whether a site offers full text feed (where the whole story goes to the newsreader) or such highlights, which would force the interested reader to click-through to the site originating the feed.

The article is strongly if favour of partial feeds, even though most readers appear to want full feeds. The argument is that click-throughs are higher and ad revenues will be better. If people visit the site there is more the site can learn about them and more chance of building a brand relationship.

Reference is made to a study conducted by Pheedo, an RSS advertising network, as well as talking about full and partial feeds the study covers a number of other interesting areas, such as Feed Reader Market Share.

Via a lead from Quentin at Virtual Surveys

Making Life Easier with Life Hacks

Life Hacks are tricks, ideas, suggestions, and tools for making your life easier and for increasing your productivity. The Economist recently carried an article extolling the virtues of potential of Life Hacking (10th-16th June 2006). One example hack quoted by the Economist is to set your email so that it only downloads email every 15 minutes, or perhaps even every hour (I have set it to 20 minutes and I think it is helping). The idea is that you get interrupted less often and get on with you top priority task instead. Also, I have found that by downloading every 20 minutes I often get 2 or 3 related emails, for example one asking for help, a second clarifying the request, and third a reply from somebody else solving the problem - and I did not have to do anything.

More information on Life Hacking is available at Lifehacker.com and 43Folders.com.

One really useful post at 43Folders is Writing Sensible Email Messages, which focuses on how you can write your emails in ways which make it more likely that you will get the response (be that a reply or an action).

Virtual Surveys Launches the 5As

Virtual Surveys have launched a new website benchmarking system called the 5As. Based on 6 years of normative data and hundreds of websites, Virtual Surveys have scored websites on 5 types: Advocates, Affiliates, Attractables, Apathetics, and Antagonistics.

Successful sites, ones which have more people recommending them, which have more people saying they will re-visit, and more people saying they like the site have more Advocates and fewer Antagonistics.

Virtual Surveys are using the 5As in two key ways:
To benchmark sites against norms (total and by website category),
As a diagnostic tool to advise sites how they can best improve their site. The 5As were launched by Ray Poynter (as a director of Virtual Surveys) at a breakfast seminar in Manchester Art Gallery, 13th June 2006. The next seminar covering the 5As will be at the Museum of London on 20th June - more info available on Virtual Surveys website.

Website Survey Course to be Updated

Ray Poynter, Managing Director of The Future Place, has been commissioned to update Web Survey Research module of Georgia University's Principles of Marketing Research course. This will be the second time that Ray has updated the course, since he first wrote it in 2002.

The course was established in 1996 and comprises 10 compulsory modules, e.g. Sampling, Measurement Instruments, and Communicating Results, and two option modules, Ray's Web Survey Research and International Research.