Jeffrey Henning’s #MRX Top 10: Social Media Engagement, Analytics and Forecasting

By Jeffrey Henning

Of the 29,013 (!) unique links shared on #MRX last week, here are 10 of the most retweeted that rose above the spam…

1. Using social to fast forward to the future – Rosie Hawkins of TNS, writing for Research, sees social-media market research as posing “the ‘microscope vs. telescope’ dilemma.” She writes, “There is a balance to strike between the strategy (based on a longer-term view of category and consumer dynamics – the telescope) and taking quick, reactive advantage of specific opportunities or disruptions in the market (the microscope). Marketers need to be truly agile as too much focus on real-time marketing risks losing the bigger picture.”
2. MR disruption continues: Barnes & Noble College rolls out research offering– Lenny Murphy discusses how the Barnes & Noble campus-bookstore arm is extending its research to more than 5 million U.S. college students, offering students points towards bookstore purchases in exchange for survey responses, while developing custom Millennial research services.
3. Why Big Data alone is an inadequate source of customer intelligence– Tyler Douglas of Vision Critical covers three reasons why the ROI from Big Data can be low: “1. Most companies don’t know how to use Big Data for strategic decisions. 2. Big Data doesn’t provide a complete picture. 3. It lacks the ‘why.'” Big Data doesn’t remove the need for traditional types of research.
4. Social media engagement rates decline– Bronwen Morgan of Research recaps Forrester and Mobile Marketer studies on social media; as the volume of social-media posts has increased, engagement with those posts has decreased.
5. The future of research in talent and training– Simon Chadwick of Cambiar recaps research from his organization into how the skills necessary for market research are shifting from the tactical (e.g., report writing, project management, PowerPoint skills) to the strategic (e.g., storytelling, consulting, synthesis). Unfortunately, firms are doing a poor job of training their staff for these strategic skills.
6. AMSRS 2015 conference workshop wrap-up– Victoria Gamble of Blaze Research compiled a round-up of links to the tools and books discussed at this AMSRS workshop for streamlining social-media marketing and presenting.
7. Social media analytics: promises, challenges and the future– Marketing scientists Kevin Gray and Koen Pauwels raise questions about the claims of social-media market research, especially the claim that social desirability bias is a bigger issue with surveys than social media.
8. While some things change, others will stay the same– Zontziry Johnson argues that the core approach and ethics of market research will remain constant, even as new techniques and technologies emerge.
9. Smartphones become the ‘remote control’ to people’s lives– Jane Bainbridge of Research summarizes Deloitte research into UK consumers’ pervasive usage of smartphones: 55% check their phone within 15 minutes of waking up, 36% look at their phone at least 25 times a day, and 28% check their phone within 5 minutes of going to bed.
10. When Big Data becomes bad data: The limits of analytics– Lauren Kirchner of ProPublica discusses how algorithmic bias from data mining and predictive analytics can amplify the impact of past discrimination.

Note: This list is ordered by the relative measure of each link’s influence in the first week it debuted in the weekly Top 5. A link’s influence is a tally of the influence of each Twitter user who shared the link and tagged it #MRX, ignoring retweets from closely related accounts. Only links with a research angle are considered.