The Future Place Blog

Which conference should I attend?

This is a perennial question, how to choose which events to attend, as a delegate, speaker, or exhibitor. This is a topic that I am very interested in at the moment as I am helping organises a one day conference in London, later in the year. And, the flip side of which conferences should I attend is how to design a conference that meets real needs.

Robert Scoble’s blog, Scobleizer, has a really interesting post on this topic. Scoble advocate Upcoming, which in term he describes as being an example of crowdsourcing. You can add events, you can see which events your friends are going to be attending, and you can search for events.

I had a quick look at Nottingham and it had a good range of local social, musical, cultural events. Upcoming can also work in conjunction with FaceBook. I think I will give it a try, and if it is great I will blog some more.

Yahoo add a women to the board, for the first time!

CNet report that Yahoo have appointed Maggie Wilderotter to their board. Maggie will be the first women ever on Yahoo’s board, does that sound prehistoric or what? Yahoo’s board will expand from 11 to 12 to accommodate Wilderotter, and given that Yahoo have had a board for 12 years, there is really no excuse.

Is working from home good for you?

LifeHacker has an interesting post, with good comments, about whether working from home is good for you.

My view is that working from home only works for some people and for some oranisations. Many people need a context to ensure they actually work, others need a context to ensure that they stop working at the end of the normal day. Most training and staff development work best when people are physically working together. But for some people, me included, working from home is great. I have been doing it for almost ten years. However, as Virtual Surveys and my network of The Future Place clients grow I am spending more time away from home, probably two days a week on average.

Is FaceBook buzz just hype

Sam Winstanley has a great post on his blog discussing why FaceBook seems to be taking off in such a big way. One of the interesting anecdotes in his post is that it was his wife who invited him to join FaceBook, which surprised him becasue: a) he thought he was the techie one, and b) she was only a few feet away.

Sam covers some really interesting ground and the post is well worth reading.

Specialist or Generalist

ResearchTalk have new podcast, as a pre-cast for the ESOMAR Congress, with Peter Cooper, David Smith, and Nick Bonney. The three of them discuss whether we want the researchers of the future going to be a specialist or a generalist. Although they do not come to any hard and fast conclusions, the topics they cover are certainly thought provoking.

I have an additional angle to the ones covered in the podcast. As well as the issue about techniques there is also the issue of category specialisation. The researcher of the 1970s and 1980s prided themselves on having skills that could be used for almost any product in almost any market. But, with the rise of brand-consumer discourses, researchers need to be more more integrated into the category, meaning that researchers will tend to be specialists in specific categories, rather than generalists, in my humble opinion.

More about FaceBook

I am now 100% convinced that market research and FaceBook are going through a tipping point. I suspect that everybody who is creative, and anybody who wants to hang onto their coat tails, will be actively using FaceBook by the end of September. It looks as though there are perhaps 500 European FaceBook market researchers at the moment. My prediction? We will see 2000 market researchers networking via FaceBook by October (i.e. after ESOMAR Congress), and by the end of the year 8000, i.e. more than the membership of ESOMAR.

Groups on FaceBook that might interest researchers include:
I work in market research and no I don't stand on the street with a clipboard
The Research Magazine Forum
ResearchTalk on Facebook
Research 2.0

The links above will take you to the groups, but you will have to join FaceBook to access them - do it! If you are new to FaceBook then perhaps the first thing you want to do is see who is a member of a group, if you recognise anybody you can ask them to be your friend. Then, check out the wall, this is the easiest place to see the sort of things people are talking about, then decide if you want to join the group. When you join a group you can easily check the other groups that people like you are a member of.

The FaceBook Bandwagon

After following the amazing amount of buzz about FaceBook over the last few weeks I took the plunge at the weekend and became one of the many over 25s in running to catch up by joining FaceBook. Market Researchers from all over the planet seem to be rushing to catch up with their younger colleagues.

In the course of the last week I have made contact with more lost contacts than I did with Friends Reunited and LinkedIn combined, and had some fun. At the moment I am not sure whether FaceBook will stay just fun, will become an essential part of being in the Market Research community, or like Friends Reunite, simply make way for newer toys - but it is fun at the moment.

If you are a FaceBook user and would like to renew a contact with me you can find me here, or simply search “Ray Poynter” – there is only one Ray Poynter on FaceBook!

If you are not using FaceBook then I think you should, soon!

Corporate flogging, the power of irony

Green chameleon have a great post/video which rips apart the process of corporate blogging and indeed knowledge management. After you finish chuckling about how funny the video is, have a think about how blogging operates in your company, is it too similar?

Vis Johnnie Moore

BBC criticised over misleading poll report

The BBC has had a complaint upheld that it misrepresented polling information. Back in January the leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party, Alex Salmond, was being interviewed by the BBC. During the interview the interviewer, Jeremy Paxman, said the BBC had conducted a straw poll with the 25 largest companies in Britain and the 25 largest companies in Scotland and none favoured independence for Scotland. The clear implication being that there was no support for independence amongst leading companies.

However, the interviewer did not tell Mr Salmond that most of the 50 companies had declined to answer, which left open the possibility that some or even most did favour independence. A viewer made a complaint at the time and this has just been upheld.

In one sense this story is a reminder of the classic logic fallacy, just because we can’t sall all the balls are red, it does not mean all the balls are all non-Red. The SNP also take it as a reminder that the British media is very much a Southern media, for London and the Home Counties (for non-Brits the Home Counties are the areas around London such as Kent, Surrey, and Middlesex).

For the BBC report click here, via Research Magazine.

Ps sorry for two stories about UK regional media bias in two days, I will try to look for something more global tomorrow

Why is the UK media worried about flooding now?

I have immense sympathy for all those who have been affected by the flooding over the last couple of days in England, places such as Tewksbury and Gloucester. Just as I had sympathy with all those other parts of England that have flooded over the past few weeks, for example Sheffield and even small villages near to me such as Lambley and Gunthorpe.

However, I was at first surprised that the media is suddenly blaming the Government and the issue is only now being raised in Parliament. Then the penny dropped, this time the flooding is in the South, where most of the media and politicians live, and in the case of places on the Severn and Avon, where many of them have second homes. For those of you not familiar with the UK, this is typical of the English establishment, a flood in the North is local news story, a flood in the South is a national disaster.

I am sure that part of the remedy in the future, for the UK’s flooding problems, is a change in building regulations to force new houses to be built with water retention polices, such as porous drives, underground tanks, and soakaways that do not feed directly into the drainage systems. A scheme such as this is being called for by the MP for Nottingham South, Alan Simpson, and MP who has the River Trent running through his area. We must also stop building in areas prone to flooding.