The LinkedIn Map of my own professional network is both hideously ugly and beautifully instructive at the same time.

It’s beautifully ugly.

It’s ugly, because colors can’t be changed, because perspective can’t be rotated, because labeling only works when zoomed-in.  LinkedIn depicts my professional network as one big blob and some other separate connections.

But it’s instructive, for many more reasons… [Read more]

The materials for this sculpture are “Reed, wood, plastic, data”.

Hurricane Noel: Reed, wood, plastic, data; 32"x32"x36", 2010

Reed, wood, and plastic, sure.  But data?  As an art supply?

Yes.

Artist Nathalie Miebach weaves weather data into 3D sculptures.  And these 3D sculptures are also musical scores.

“Every single bead, every single colored band, represents a weather element that can also be read as a musical note,” she says.

Market Researchers are so behind…

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“The debt crisis in the European Monetary Union as seen by a 9-year old” reinforces four topics for market researchers:

1. Data visualization
2. Child labor
3. Crowdsourcing
4. Form follows function

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A couple of months ago I was fortunate enough to be in the audience at a highly memorable Customer Experience presentation in LA. Jim Knight, Sr. Director of Training and Development at Hard Rock International hotel group spoke at the Next Generation CE Conference. The Hard Rock approach resonated with me, so I asked Jim if he would be kind enough to give an interview. Here’s a synopsis of what he told me about their unique approach to Guest Experience Delivery:

Jane Edwards-Hall:  Jim, you told me that you recruit only the world’s misfits – tell me more about that!

Jim Knight: There’s no silver bullet but we do truly recruit for attitude and not necessarily hospitality skills or experience – we can teach that. We look for people who can be themselves and provide an “unpredictable” guest experience – and we take this philosophy worldwide. We want people with a master’s degree in Personality! We have a rigorous process supporting our recruitment methodology. We interview people who are basically square pegs trying to fit into round holes and who honestly wouldn’t get jobs elsewhere – we want the world’s weird!

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You probably haven’t ever heard ‘hot’ and ‘mystery shopping’ in the same sentence. But, the world of mystery shopping is spicing up as more traditional researchers deploy mystery shopping programs in ways you would least expect.

Government agencies, hospitals, healthcare providers, and even schools are using mystery shoppers to ensure their service delivery chains are functioning within required operating procedures. As panels become more specialized, more and more professional and B2B services are employing mystery shopping solutions as well. [Read more]

“Cancer Sucks” said one of the buttons on the nurse’s uniform.

This is not news.

But, as a market researcher facing more downtime, I started analyzing the button.  Grammatically, culturally, typographically.  And there are implications for how we present market research information.

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Recently one of my colleagues mentioned that Pizza Hut now offers free unlimited salads. We decided to give it a try for lunch and had differing opinions about the experience. I noticed that two of my Facebook friends were having a similar discussion online. One friend said it was good that companies care about the health of their customers while another friend argued that it was just a PR stunt and he “wasn’t planning to go there to eat some bland grass”. The topic was also trending on Twitter and forums in the same way as my colleague and I were talking about it face-to-face.

Brand trackers monitor people’s attitudes towards a brand over time using “traditional” survey techniques. Tracking studies are very useful, allowing us to identify changes in attitudes and measure the impact of marketing activities and brand strategy. I have been talking about how buzz tracking can provide brands with valuable insights about what people think and how they react and can be used as an early warning system. But can social media monitoring also predict attitudes observed from brand tracking?  And could these buzz results provide the same level of insight on brand performance without having to wait weeks to get more traditional survey tracking results?

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One of the main questions clients ask us is how they can use social media monitoring for their business. By now everybody recognises the importance of social media, but we need to be aware that there is much more we can do besides listening to and engaging with social media conversations. Used in conjunction with traditional research, buzz tracking can be a powerful tool for any company to generate ‘real-time’ insights about the things that matter to consumers, thereby optimising their communications and developing business strategies that connect with people.

• Early warning system: social media monitoring gives immediate feedback into how your brand is perceived, what is happening right now around your brand (eg: news, PR, a bad review) and how people are reacting to things you do. When Gap released its new logo, it was immediately hit with thousands of comments on Facebook and Twitter criticising the change and this resulted in Gap switching back to their original logo.

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The Onion and The Economist are required reading for many market researchers.  Conveniently, the two publications sometimes cross-reference each other.  Like when The Onion “reported”…

‘The Economist’ To Halt Production For Month To Let Readers Catch Up

LONDON—World-renowned news and opinion magazine The Economist announced plans to suspend any new online and print content for the next month in an effort to finally allow subscribers a chance to catch up…

Seeing my own stack of unread issues of The Economist, I decided to catch up (whilst The Economist went on publishing, of course).

Two articles immediately lent themselves to our topic of data presentation.  One article suggests  a compelling correlation, the other offers a cunning comparison.  Both are relevant for market researchers and how we look at data.

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Starbucks is often mentioned as one of the best examples of how to use social media to engage with customers, strengthen brand image (Interbrand, Best Global Brands 2010) and ultimately improve sales. So how do they do it? Starbucks not only listen to their customers but they also engage in a digital dialogue and act. The company launched My Starbucks Idea in 2008, to encourage customers to submit their ideas and vote on them. As well as listening to what people are suggesting, they are also reviewing and implementing many of these suggestions, allowing people to see the status of their submissions.

In my last post I talked about the importance of listening to online conversations, but effective social media monitoring goes beyond listening. We have developed a five step process, which enables us to use buzz data to generate insights and to help companies to design and implement relevant strategies.

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