The Future Place Blog

Insight into Facebook and UK Society

I find that I gather some of my best insights about the way social networks are being used by listening to other people’s conversations on the train, particular younger people. Yesterday was one such day.

Returning from London to Nottingham a group of five twenty-something women sat near me and starting discussing their day etc. This led to two interesting snippets about Facebook.

1)    After a couple of them had been talking about Facebook, one suddenly said “Everyone I know keeps talking about Facebook, I don’t even have a Facebook account!”. The look on the other four’s faces was a mixture of shock and horror!

2)    One of the group then started talking about how some of the requests for friends were weird. She recounted a story about an ex-boyfriend. About 4 years ago she had been living with this boy, but had to work away quite a bit. She came back at 5:00am one morning and found him in their bed with some girl she had never met. Not surprisingly, they broke up, the guy married the other girl, and evidently they have had two kids. The person telling the tale signed up to Facebook last October and in December both the ex-boyfriend and his wife (the one in her bed) – both sent Facebook be my friend requests. The others asked what she did. She replied, I said yes, I wanted them to see how well I was doing!

Mores about how we communicate and the way we use the term friend seem to be in flux, which certainly has implications for all of those in the insight business.

Use bullet graphs rather than gauges

ExcelUser has a great article about creating bullet graphs to show performance data. The author argues that gauges take up too much space on the page and are too hard to read.

BrandZ update

Nigel Hollis's blog as a good piece looking at Millward Brown's BrandZ study (an annual global study about brands) and discussing whether it is sufficiently marketed.

I think we can probably expand issue about marketing to most of the MR industry. I am often surprised that we can spend so much time look at marketing, measuring the return from marketing, testing new marketing, yet remain so unaffected by it. I suspect that most clients would have difficulty explaining the key brand attributes of their suppliers.

Exciting system to rate research agencies

MRWeb has an interesting report about a system that the US MRA is putting in place to allow users of research agencies to post reviews of them, anonymously. This process will be quite scary for agencies, but must, in the long term, be good for the users of market research.

Great analysis of Skoda's cake ad

Nigel Hollis has a great piece of analysis on his blog about the Skoda cake ad. Not everybody buys into the Milward Brown model of ad testing, but this article gives insight in the MB approach, and is an interesting perspective on the Skoda ad.

The Barbarians Are At The Gate!

Over the last few weeks I have been lucky enough to attend conferences in London, Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Singapore. At those conferences I have seen several very good presentations, looking at new techniques, especially those looking at Web 2.0 and ethnography. However, I have also seen far too much navel-gazing, too much concentration on internal market research processes and not enough about the competitive context for the services we offer.

My main concern has been about the tendency to spend hours discussing the need to refine and tweak the way we conduct online panels, at the expense of discussing other topics. Yes, we need to keep improving our procedures, but that should be done at the technocratic level, not via conference presentations, IMHO.
My main concern is that whilst we are busy looking at our internal processes, we are not spending enough time looking at the many forces that are looking to take a share of our business, people who are looking to “eat our lunch”.

Here are a few of the forces that are beginning to re-shape the competitive context:

• Opinion Leader Panels such, as P&G’s Tremor and VocalPoint, combine market research with word of mouth marketing. The cost equation of a service that offers to both research and market your product is very different from one that simply offers research.
• Organisations such as BuzzMetrics and Cymfony are using Word of Mouth systems to measure the buzz on the net. They raise the prospect of measuring what customers are saying to each other (in forums, chat rooms, and blogs), without conducting surveys. Why ask some of us, when you can listen to all of us?.
• Brand are increasingly opening their own Web 2.0 operations, allowing marketers and NPD groups to talk directly with customers, bypassing both market research agencies and clientside insight departments.
• Social Networks, such as Facebook, are developing tools to allow marketers and NPD teams to develop polls and surveys that can reach customers for a fraction of the price of real research, and without the ‘hassle’ of experts telling them not to conduct their research according to inconvenient codes of conduct.
• Free and almost free products such as Survey Monkey are resulting in more departments, particularly in the social sector, conducting more research at the departmental level, without involving insight teams and suppliers.

In addition, to these Web 2.0 related threats; the research industry still faces the double-pronged attack management consultants and direct marketing.

The Phorm model may be sunk – I hope!

Phorm is a scary UK initiative to track the websites most UK Internet users visit and to track what we type in when we visit these site, via users’ own ISPs, and then to use that information to serve them advertising. Phorm has been set up to work with the key UK ISPs, such as BT, Virgin Media, and TalkTalk. Phorm expects to have access to the browsing habits of 70% of UK broadband users. If have been writing about electronic wake issues for some years now, but this is the one that is likely to make the topic one of popular outrage.

When the system was first unveiled and trialled there was an explosion of concern and Phorm backtracked to the point where it agreed to allow users to opt-out. However, it was likely that to opt-out a user would have to do it separately for each computer they used and for each account that had on that computer. At present it looks as though opting out would only stop the ads being served, it would not stop your Internet traffic being recorded and added to Phorm’s database.

Phorm and the ISPs plan to do this monitoring by using deep packet inspection (dpi), which means that the ISP opens and reads information travelling to and from the Internet users. There is also a concern that it could edit that information – for example changing the results from a Google search request.

Phorm and the ISPs claim the data they collect would be entirely anonymous, but there is great doubt about whether this would be true. For example, when AOL accidently put the search records of 650,000 users into the public domain in 2006, specific individuals were identified.

The potentially good news is that, according to the BBC, the UK Information Commissioner has said that in the UK the ad serving part of Phorm must be opt-in. That might be enough to kill the Phorm initiative, unless the ISPs find some way round it, because it is hard to see that many people will choose to monitored and targeted for unwanted ads.

There had been some hope that the Home Office would also rule that Phorm was illegally intercepting messages (remember they are planning to open the traffic to and from your computer and read it), but the Home Office seems happy. I suspect that this is because either the Home Office plans to use Phorm to monitor what we do, or because the Home Office is already, or plans to, use a similar system to monitor what UK people are doing and saying online.

If Phorm does go ahead, then expect to see a large number of people leaving Virgin, TalkTalk, and in particular BT.

It would be nice to see initiatives from Market Research organisations such as ESOMAR, MRS, and ASMRS making it clear that they oppose Phorm and anything similar. It would also help if advertisers were to make it clear that they would avoid this intrusion - but that may be hoping for too much.

ESOMAR’s Asia Pacific Conference, April 2008

One day of workshops, two days of Conference attending, and it is all over. As far as I am concerned it was the trip to Singapore was well worth making. The Conference had some weak bits, but I will ignore these, there were a few daft ideas (and I will ignore all but one of them), but there was lots that was good, and 260 interesting people to meet and dine with (and wonderful food).

For me the highpoint was the keynote by Tony Fenandes (see yesterday’s post). Other high points included: Lee Ryan and Lisa Li talking about how the digital world is impacting young people in China. Jerry Clode and Jim Poppelwell showed a great knowledge of China Web 2.0 sites, such as qq.com.

One of the best presentations was by Ian Stewart of MTV and Graham Saxton of OTX Research. Ian and Graham shared masses of findings about trends and changes, and better still the full deck of slides and information is available on SlideShare here. This is part of MTV/Stewart’s open source approach of making as much information as possible available. The slides are a treasure trove of information.

The saddest aspect of the Conference was the news that Rhiannon will be leaving ESOMAR after 10 years. Rhiannon has helped many people over the past 10 years and will be much missed. I’d like to wish her all best wishes for her next venture.

The daft idea? The issue about online reliability was given excessive prominence, compared with other problems. Of course we need to ensure that we do as good a job as possible online, but we must not be spooked into thinking online is worse than offline. A video of a Coke exec perpetuated the story about the same survey being fielded twice with the same panel company and producing different results. As I understand it, the source of this urban ‘story’ comes from a presentation by P& G a couple of years ago. But, until the data and methodology is published it must be regarded as simply anecdotal. However, the industry has tens of thousands of positive example of test-retest studies. Almost all online tracking studies use the same questionnaire, given to the same panel, separated by a short period of time. Do most tracking studies suffer from showing wild and interesting movements? No, they are as flat and boring as their offline equivalents.

Just consider for one moment the comparison between online and CLT (central location testing). Online certainly has some issues, but the idea that we might conduct a national study in somewhere like Australia or USA by interviewing people in small, localised parts of four cities spread across the countries is a great deal more risky than an online study – but for many years CLT was the norm for many companies, many countries, and many types of study.

Perhaps the key point is not that some clients have raised reasonable concerns. Perhaps the key point is that there do not seem to be any clients who want to pay 40% more to go back to CATI or face-to-face. We should always be improving our procedures, but we need to avoid being panicked by anecdote and out-of-date approaches to Web 1.0 approaches to working with respondents.

A panel discussion about online research did, however, come to the view that within five years 20%-30% of all research in Asia will be conducted online – approaching the current percentage in Australia.

Tony Fernandes - great speaker!

The keynote speaker at this year's ESOMAR's Asia Pacific Conference in Singapore was Tony Fernandes, CEO/Owner of AirAsia - a leading (he would say the leading) budget airline in Asia, originating out of Malaysia.

Fernandes is a natural communicator and gave the attendees a great explanation of how he did it his way, and how that turned out so successful. Although Fernandes gives the appearance of a lad from the streets who has done well, he actually has a strong pedigree both academically and in business, having previously been financial controller of Virgin Records in London and the South East Asian regional vice-president for Warner Music Group from 1992-2001. What he clearly has is the triple combination of having the background skills, the ability to communicate with people (staff and customers), and the ability to pursue a dream with vigour.

If you ever get a chance to see him speak, grab the chance, it will be well worth some travel, waiting,or inconvenience!

George Soros Predicts Further Economic Woes

George Soros has published his thoughts in a new book “The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Mean”. I have not read the book yet, but I did listen to an interesting interview with Soros this morning on Bloomber, and harvested a few key facts from early reviews, such as those in the The Independent and The Telegraph.

Soros’s main point is that the world’s economy is facing its biggest challenge since the 1930s, and that the sixty-year long term growth in the power of what he calls leverage and which loosely translates into borrowing has come to an end.

Soros reserves much of his criticism for market fundamentalists, people who believe that markets are self-regulating. He points out that regulators, such as National Banks, have repeatedly had to step in over the last few years to sort out market problems, most recently Northern Rock and Bear Sterns.
An article on Bloomberg puts it this way: 'The belief that markets tend towards equilibrium is directly responsible for the current turmoil,’ the billionaire philanthropist writes. ‘It encouraged the regulators to abandon their responsibility and rely on the market mechanism to correct its own excesses.’ .

One interesting sign of the times is that at present the book is only available as an e-book, the hardcover will be available in May.

And the implications for Market Researchers? Well I guess the main one is to expect some of your clients to go bust, including some blue chips. This means practicing normal good business procedures such as not being too dependent on any one client, and ensuring that invoices and payments are processed promptly. It might mean harder times for agencies looking for funds or looking to sell. In terms of consumers, we should be looking to detect changes in priorities and strategies. In the past retailers knew that during a recession sales of staples such as bread and jam would increase. If we do have new hard times, what will be the implication for ‘indispensibles’ such as tv-packages, overseas holidays, and mobile phones?