It’s showtime!  Often overlooked in business situations is the need to “entertain” or at least “capture the imagination” of your audience.  Seen Seth Godin speak?  I still think about purple cows after seeing his Ted Talk video about How to Get Your Ideas to Spread almost 5 years ago.

Like it or not, we live in a Facebook, Twitter and YouTube world.  You need to put on a good show, from weekly team meetings to the boardroom. Think of yourself as a content producer!

Below I have done a roundup of easy to use DIY, free or almost free, online tools that can give your research reports some pop.  Some are well known and a few are more obscure.

Piktochart: Create an Infographic

It’s been the year of the infographic. And for good reason! Infographics force you to think about which data is critical and how it ties together. Piktochart offers a really easy way to create infographics with great looking templates and an easy-to-use interface.  I used it to create our Pinterest & Brands Infographic without any help from my graphic designers.

Prezi: Getting Beyond Powerpoints!

Prezi is a wildly popular tool offering beautiful templates that are interactive and make embedding pictures and videos easy. Even my middle schooler is using it for presentations at school. And so should you.

Storify:  Create a Story from Social Media Posts

Mining social media (your own social accounts, top influencers, your competition) is a great way to add pop to your internal reports and presentations.  Storify makes it easy to capture social media examples to create a storyline.

PicMonkey:  Photo Edit like a Pro

Creating fun images with captions and effects is simple with PicMonkey. It’s a robust photo editing tool that is a favorite among my bloggers.  It’s also great for resizing and cropping images too.  I use PicMonkey almost daily.

Go Animate: Get Animated

Go Animate makes it simple to create compelling videos for your research reports. Creating a video does require some work but I think you can inpress your boss or client with this one.

Toondoo: Cartoon it

Creating a cartoon is a bit more difficult and requires some creativity, but for cartoonist wannabes Toondoo is a great tool. So if you’ve ever felt you were living a Dilbert moment while looking at research results this might be the tool for you.

There are many, many more tools out there to build a better story. What are your favorites?

The meme Big Data has rapidly taken hold over the past few years.  Big data refers to all the digital information from social media, connected devices, company CRMs,  Enterprise Feedback Management systems, analytics systems, and on and on.  The amount of data being generated every day is estimated to be over 3 Exabytes! That’s an immense amount of data.

Qualitative researchers have a different big data challenge when it comes to online and mobile qual.  One of the great things about online Immersive Research is the ability to quickly capture a large amount of expression from engaged participants. However this also represents a challenge for analysis.  For example in a recent project, seventy participants produced 400 pages of text and over 1,100 images in 5 days of activities.

While the size of all this data can be measured in mere gigabytes vs. exabytes, to a qualitative researcher, it is a huge mountain of in-depth information.  We have a phrase for this phenomenon here at Revelation – we call it “Little Big Data.”

Faced with Little Big Data, qual researchers have understandably looked to technology for help, especially looking at text analytics for some help. However, I have talked to researchers who have utilized different text analytics tools (some integrated into qualitative analysis packages, some fully dedicated text analysis) and  quite a few reported to be less than satisfied.   The effort to set up and tune the tools to be effective was often greater than the perceived benefit. At the end of the day, many of the researchers I talked with felt they weren’t much better off than printing out transcripts and whipping out their trusty highlighters.

The problem with all of these tools isn’t about the quality of the tools in their own right, it’s that moving data out of an online qualitative system into a text analysis system results in much more effort.  Think about it:  a well designed online qualitative research app knows who the participants are in the study, knows in which segment they belong, and knows what questions they’ve answered.  So to export everything out of an online qual app and then import it into another analysis tool means a researcher has to reassemble the context of the entire study before the value of the analysis tool is realized.

The tools will continue to improve (such as the Word Tree contextual text visualization in Revelation shown below), but I think it’s safe to say that a silver bullet has not emerged for the challenge of ‘Little Big Data.’

However, there may be one strategy being left out.  That is, gasp!, collect less information.  This notion seems contrary to researchers’ natural desire to get as much data as possible.  But I will argue that managing data flow is now part of the online qual research gig.

In traditional face-to-face qualitative research, the conventions of project scoping are well established. Researchers can count on showing up at a facility or a home and know exactly how much time they will spend speaking with participants, and have a good sense for how much data they will be getting.  In a sense, the duration of in-person interviews represents natural “time boxes” that also provides a basis for scoping the effort of the overall project.

But what happens when a project is “on” 24 hours a day? What happens when the “time boxes” of interview durations are not in play, yet project timelines still call for a quick turnaround on reporting?

Suddenly, paying very close attention to the amount of data you collect starts to become a viable and necessary strategy to deal with ‘Little Big Data.’  Being very thoughtful about the number of activities or participants or duration of a study, as well as a defining a clear analysis strategy upfront, makes a lot of sense.

Earlier this month Andrew Needham, Face’s CEO, chaired Esomar’s Global Qualitative Research Conference in Amsterdam. The main thread of his speech was the rapid pace of change and what this means for qualitative research. Here are some excerpts from both his introduction and closing remarks.

“It is the speed and impact of this change that is worrying for many of us…

Greece and the Euro Crisis represent just one of the many manifestations of the changing world order: how to achieve growth in a developed world laden with debt. Others such as the speed of change in terms of product life cycles; globalization – the shift of importance to emerging markets; sustainability of world resources, changing demographics and the challenge of ageing populations on western economies are all significant challenges in their own right.

But that is not to mention one of the biggest drivers of change namely the impact of the social web on everything we do. Emarketer’s report at the end of 2011 predicted the tipping point would happen this year when 60% of marketing budgets would become social.

A major Ad Age headline in 2011, entitled “Will Social Media Replace Surveys” as a research tool brought the implications of this to bear on our very own doorstep. The top Research Executive, Joan Lewis for Procter and Gamble, the world’s biggest research buyer, predicted the dramatic decline in the importance of surveys by 2020 because of the rise of social media.

More recently Marc Pritchard P&G’s Global Marketing and Brand Building Officer outlined the company’s new approach to digital marketing as it aimed to build “lifelong, one-to-one relationships in real time with every person in the world”.

For research to help companies like P&G achieve such an ambitious goal we are going to need to embrace change.

We can start by asking ourselves some important questions, questions we had in fact discussed as a Committee that had helped shape the agenda for this year’s Conference: How well as a research industry are we responding to change. Are we moving faster enough? Are we being innovative enough? Are we helping our clients to keep up and stay ahead of their consumers? What role should qualitative research play in the more continuous and adaptive marketing ecosystem that is emerging and do we have the right skills and tools to make us fit for purpose.

Some of the answers to these questions are in the papers and presentations we are about to cover over the next two days but it’s worth quickly drawing out a few key themes below:

1. Quality
The panelists at the session “Ensuring the future Growth of Market Research” at Esomar’s Congress in Atlanta highlighted the importance of quality and scientific robustness if research is to remain the true keepers of insight. It is critical that we apply the rigour of qualitative methodologies as we apply new techniques presented to us through the use of technology. We are fortunate to have Unilever attend to explain their thinking behind their Accreditation Programme designed to ensure gold standard in the quality of Qualitative Research.

2. Speed & Action
It is incumbent upon us as an industry to make sure that quality insight is delivered more quickly and cost effectively than we have ever done (or needed to do) before so that we can help companies speed up decision-making processes rather than just help people make better decisions more slowly. Promise’s paper with Sony talked about how to instill insight for competitive advantage by helping companies become Strategic Foresight Organisations. It can also mean doing more with less in these straitened times as Insites demonstrated in its paper with KLM.

3. Innovation
Making sure that we are constantly innovating with new approaches and techniques that deliver robust, actionable insight will also become increasingly important in a world that is changing so quickly. Firefish’s paper with BT, Face’s paper with Nokia, Brainjuicer’s paper with Kelloggs and Engage’s paper with CNBC were all good examples of this.

4. Qualitative Skills
And finally “Will the arrival of Big Data where there’s now so much qualitative data available for free change the whole business model for qualitative research?” Do all qualitative agencies for example need to be plugged in with real time social data so we can help companies like P&G build 121 relationships in real time with their consumers? If so they will need to have an understanding of quantitative and social intelligence skills so we can connect the dots. The Panel Discussion Qualitative Skills in the New World should not be missed!”

Andrew’s concluding thoughts on the Conference

“For me there were two important themes that come out of this year’s Conference.

First of all the big opportunity for us as qualitative researchers is that in a world of increasing data obesity there is going to be a massive need for more human analysis – more depth, more richness, more rigour, more clarity of insight – all the skills we can bring to the table as qualitative researchers – rather than less. We are perfectly placed from what I have read and seen at the Conference to be the true custodians of insight.

But we shouldn’t think this was naturally going to fall into our laps. One frustration or concern I have is that we’re not moving quickly enough to keep up with the speed of change so that other categories of business are being afforded the opportunity to muscle into our patch. To win in this space we are going to have to combine rigour with speed, – it’s not a question of either or – we need to do both well. In my view this will increasingly mean that qualitative research is no longer delivered purely on an ad hoc project- by-project basis (as it has largely been done to date with a focus group based model) but on a more continuous, real time and strategic basis. Promise’s paper with Sony was a clear example of this.

Secondly, what excites me and should excite all the bright young students that are sitting in front of me is that for the first time in the history of research we can help clients deliver in a meaningful way on the mantra of putting consumers at the heart of their business to give them competitive advantage. This will require different skill sets where we will need to combine qualitative skills with quantitative and social intelligence ones.Insites’s paper with KLM is a good example of bringing all three together.”

He finished by concluding that new roles and titles are going to emerge in the coming years so that a recruitment advertisement for a qualitative researcher in 2020 will read and look very different to what we are seeing today. The day will come, he surmised, when it could be as cool to work in the research industry as it is supposedly to work in advertising!

Ted Frank from Backstories Studio presented at the QRCA conference in Montreal on how to better share research insights through the use of videos and pictures. He showed an example from an ethnographic project (click here to see the video), but his techniques would also work for focus groups and in-depth interviews. As modern qualitative researchers, we need to push ourselves to be better story tellers and to utilize the power of audio, video, and pictures to convey our experiences in the field to our clients.

Here are some ideas that Ted and others in Montreal shared:

• Make an emotional connection with your audience by turning consumers into heroes and characters with whom they can relate.
• Use music to prime the audience for insights or match the mood.   Music can be used for opening, building tension prior to the big idea, and propelling the story forward.  Go to sites like greenbuttonmusic.com to purchase rights-free music.
• B-roll (video to illustrate what someone is talking about) conveys a stronger impression than simply a long video of one person talking.  It also allows you to edit out “ums” and “ahs” between the relevant comments.
• Use close-ups of the participants with good lighting and audio to ensure the power of their words and expressions are conveyed in a meaningful way.
• When going to an ethnography or similar project, create a shot list of the types of elements to film for B-roll.  This will ensure you end the fieldwork with enough diverse footage.  It is also helpful to create a list of the types of subjects you want to photograph for use in your presentations.
• Tim Billies from CreativePoint Productions shared advice on editing your own videos and mentioned that professional level editing software can make a major difference.  He recommends the Sony Vegas and Sony Movie Studio editing software if you work in the Windows environment.  Using programs such as these can save you time in the long run and help take your editing to the next level.

Most clients have numerous demands on their time and less ability to read lengthy reports.  Video, when done well, can serve to quickly convey insights from the field in a compelling and motivating way.  If a picture is worth 1000 words, what must video be worth?

Facebook is an insights tool that most brands should add to their toolbox. Brands can reap immediate benefits by tuning into the ideas and feedback that consumers share on the platform every day. Brands with a fan base can also actively ask consumers to weigh-in on their product, service and/or marketing. And, fortunately for brands, many consumers love being asked to weigh-in and help crowdsource the next big thing.

Below are some examples of the ways companies are using Facebook to engage and better understand their fans:

#1 Lay’s goes big with the “Do us a Flavor” Chip CrowdSourcing Contest 

USA Today profiled how Lay’s went big with crowdsourcing with the ”Do Us a Flavor” contest, with a 1 million or 1% of net sales prize for the fan that comes up with a new chip flavor. Three of the top recipes will be produced and the final contest winner decided by number of Facebook votes. Facebook even gave them permission to use an ”I’d Eat That” button for the flavor choices. Lay’s has crowdsourced chip flavors in international markets before, resulting in new tastes like Caesar salad flavored chips in Argentina. Lay’s crowdsourcing stands-out for the promotional value and for the high level of participation—1 million users.  That’s a wide net to base your next chip on. I tested the contest app by choosing three flavors and writing a short description. The app whips-up an image of your flavor’s custom bag, making this a lot of fun while also staying away from a survey vibe. Lay’s is supporting the contest with a landing page and star power from Michael Symon and Eva Longria.

#2 Squishable asks fans to pick between two toy versions via Facebook

 

NYTimes recently profiled a few companies who are using social media for research.  One of the companies they looked at was Squishable, who posted two versions of its undeniably cute new chick toy, and asked users to weigh in. More than 6,000 fans voted via a comment.  Not only is this a low-cost way to get consumer product feedback, its also very fast.

#3 Miller Geniuine Draft asks fans to choose their Facebook cover photos

#4 Whole Foods posts questions and beautiful images on Facebook to generate fan comments

#5 Pampers uses fun images and fill-in-the-blanks to get fans talking

For researchers who are experienced in online webcam qualitative research, you will find some great tips on how to improve your sessions in the webinar “InterVu 201: Advanced Webcam Research,” presented by Betsy Leichliter on June 14, 2012 and sponsored by FocusVision.

To watch the archived webinar, click HERE. 

The overall message was well summarized by Betsy Leichliter at the end of her “Advanced Webcam Research” presentation: “There are many, many ways that you can let people easily share more depth with you by taking advantage of the versatile equipment and the many methods available to us.”

Betsy shares advice on three subject areas:

• Connecting with Participants
• Probing for Emotions
• Expanding the Context

Tips I found most helpful:

Connecting with Participants: This section stressed the importance of eye contact and keeping things visual to help participants feel comfortable and engaged.

• Betsy showed how it’s far better to look directly into the camera and resist the natural inclination to look in the participant’s eye, which appears to divert the moderator’s gaze.
• She also shared a secret her portrait photographer grandmother told her many years ago, which is “to look through the camera, not at it.”  (I tried this trick in a webcam session recently and found that envisioning the person behind the camera greatly improved eye contact.)

Probing for Emotions:  Betsy demonstrated two projective techniques in this section, one using Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions and another using a Picture Sort.

Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions with “stickies”

• I found Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions fascinating.  It featured 32 emotions grouped according to Plutchik’s theories.  You can find more information about the Wheel of Emotions and access the visual for your own use on Wikipedia.
• Whether using the Wheel of Emotions or a Picture Sort, Betsy recommended using an easy way for participants to choose words/pictures that best represent their feelings.  For instance, pre-populate the visual with “Stickies,” and have participants drag them onto the projective; she has found this approach far more efficient than having participants mark up the visual using a digital pencil or stamp.  Easier still is for participants to announce their choices, so the moderator or a behind-the-scenes technician can mark up the projective.

Expanding the Context:  This section showed different ways technology can be used to help people share more about their lives, experiences and environment.  Two examples from this section follow:  (The audio was a little funky in this section but well worth watching.)

• Participants extended their reach throughout the house by using corded or wireless webcams attached to laptops.
  

  Composite Storyboard created from Participant’s Video

• Betsy also had participants shoot photos and videos with their smart phones and send them to her prior to the research.  She then created a composite storyboard of their input to discuss during the live webcam session.  (Julie Cain collaborated on the storyboard example here and others in this section.)

If you’re looking for ways to add deeper learning to your Webcam Online Qualitative sessions, you’ll find this ½ hour webinar time well spent.

The Market Research in the Mobile World conference agenda was packed full of market research thought leaders, innovative case studies and tools. Below I summarized my top takeaways from the conference and showcased some of my favorite tweets.

#1 Big Data is not having a big impact on marketing yet

Don Sexton from Columbia University presented findings from a recently conducted Marketing ROI in the Era of Big Data that surveyed 253 marketing executives from large companies. The results highlight a strong belief among marketers that data is important to making good marketing decisions but that there’s a big gap in the use of data to drive marketing decisions:

• 91% of senior corporate marketers believe that successful brands use customer data to drive marketing decisions
• Yet, 39% say their own company’s data is collected too infrequently or not real-time enough
• 57% are not basing their marketing budgets on any ROI analysis

The biggest issue with the lack of data is that marketers are relying on historical data versus understanding performance to drive budgets.

You can read a good article about the study over at Advertising Age.

#2 The mobile research potential is NOT just online surveys on your mobile phone

Mobile is transforming how consumers communicate, shop, diet and overall–how they live. Mobile research needs to take into consideration and take advantage of the mobile experience (ie., touch screen, location, difficulty typing long responses, etc.). Facebook adopted the consumer experience for mobile, and as Andy Lees mentioned, research should do the same.

I could see how new services like the ShopKick mobile app which rewards users for engaging with brands in store could be at the forefront on innovating how research gets more mobile.

#3 Making research fun can get you better results

Betty Adamaou of Research thorough Gaming presented her Pimple Crisis research game, see a demo below:

It’s a good example of why gaming as a research tool is not just fun but can get respondents to open up at a new level. The interactive game takes respondents into a virtual world where they can make pimple fighting choices, use thought bubbles to give feedback and write words on mirrors.

#4 It’s not about the data it’s about the story

Gayle Lloyd from Hillenbrand, a top casket manufacturer, shared that only 37% of senior executives agree that their markert research groups are strategic. She made the valid argument that research needs to drive decision making.

I loved her example of how her organization monitors auto and fashion industry trends (i.e., fabrics, interiors, new auto shapes) to help inspire innovations for their caskets. It’s a great example of how research needs to translate into actionable business direction.

#5 Data accuracy of social media sentiments is mixed, so plan for it

There was a lot of discussion around standards for social media sentiment accuracy. It appears that given spam, grammar and other language issues it’s hard to accurately measure sentiment consistently. I like Anne Pettit’s @lovestats pragmatic approach– her reality check around the issues concerning accuracy, and recommendation to “work through it.”

Check out Annie’s recent post on Correlating Gas Prices with Social Media Sentiment.

I truly enjoyed the great presentations and the very nice crowd at the Mobile Research in the Mobile World conference. I also was impressed by the dessert tables!

What are your top takeaways?

By Day 2 of the 2012 Market Research in the Mobile World Conference in Cincinnati, I was feeling a bit fatigued in general from the super fast, dual-track format and overwhelmed from trying to keep up with real-time blogging, so I decided to do more listening and just blog about the most compelling session I attended.  That’s this one, which was definitely a conference favorite for me. (In fairness, I missed Robert Moran’s session on the future of market research, which I heard was amazing — I look forward to reading about it in others’ blogs).

NOTE:  As this blog is focused on qualitative research, my filter for listening and
blogging is slanted in that direction.  Be sure to check out Greenbook’s other blog for more report outs from MRMW:  www.greenbookblog.org.

From Andrew Sauer (P&G) and Steve August (Revelation):

• Product transitions don’t happen, they unfold… so moment-in-time qualitative can’t capture the entire story
• Need to understand context, emotions and behaviors within that story
• Problem:  P&G was losing volume and market share when moms switch sizes of diapers (but why? price sensitivity, brand confusion, performance issue?)
• Objective:  understand the process mom goes through when switching, at her pace and uninfluenced (without the research team present or even knowing the real topic, at first)
• Design:  3 months of immersive exercises conducted online and via mobile with weekly assignments, both 1-on-1′s and group interactions, retail adventures and, at the end of the study, product placement of products she did NOT choose to try

Key to the retail adventures was trying to understand which product comes next

Used regular activities (every time you go shopping, record what baby products bought), then if diapers mentioned, what size diapers?

Other activities followed… also used “fun activities”
to create a sense of community and understand
what’s going on in their lives

Advantages of Digital Qual

• Captured natural experiences
• Able to compare technical data (moms measured babies) with consumer perceptions
• Fraction of the cost of in-home research

Ok, so you’re getting the P&G, Babies and Digital Qual parts… what about the Honeymoon?

Andrew was the in-house moderator on this 3-month-long study and right in the middle of it, he got married and went off on his honeymoon.   Amazingly, he kept logging in and posting new activities for the moms to do while he was off in the Caribbean!  When this tidbit snuck out during their presentation, someone at my table suggested that the diaper study probably paid for Andrew’s honeymoon. Having worked at P&G myself, I pointed out that he was on salary, so no such luck. Later, I shared this little exchange with Andrew and he joked that his new wife works for P&G too — so she understands.  Now that’s love!

Thanks P&G, Andrew and Steve for so generously sharing with the industry.  That was a great case study to showcase how digital qual can capture the unfolding story of product transitions.

This covers some of the highlights from the afternoon sessions on Day 1 of the Market Research in the Mobile World Conference held in Cincinnati 7/18-7/19.  The event sold out with 300+ attendees from Australia to China to Brazil, London and of course the U.S..

NOTE:  As this blog is focused on qualitative research, my filter for listening and
blogging is slanted in that direction.  Be sure to check out Greenbook’s other blog for more report outs from MRMW:  www.greenbookblog.org.

From Jennifer Furia (P&G) and Julie Wittes-Schlack (Communispace):  Here and Now — Using Mobile Technologies to Deepen Your Understanding of Consumer and Shopper Needs

• Highly engaged participants are more likely to do what might be surprising…
  e.g. taking pictures directly after getting out of shower, trying on jeans in fitting room
• Questions that prompt reflection get the longest responses
• Mobile lets respondents share what they THINK they do vs. what they ACTUALLY do
• With repeated tasks, include an emotional trigger… e.g., things that annoy me, every time my daughter plays)
• Mobile helped the Secret brand explore SCENT by capturing in-the-moment pictures and discussing associations… e.g., smell of Play-Doh reminiscent of her childhood,
  smell of drying paint on wood while making a birdhouse with her boyfriend linked to
  making tree houses as child and her identity as an artist

Gayle Lloyd of Hillenbrand brought energy and enthusiasm to the MRMW event.  Her big encouragement is for market researchers to step back from the fact that the issue isn’t the amount of data but instead the ability to make something out of whatever data is at hand. The great reminder is that we’re here as market researchers to inform decisions.  Data is the tool that helps make decisions, but the market researcher must look skillfully across lots of different data types and make recommendations.

Often, market research is linear and logical.  The new frontier calls for us to firmly answer the question, “does this really tell our organizations what they need to know?”  Just because we have the graph or chart, doesn’t make it important.

I have experienced this shift as a “qual” researcher.  My expertise is quickly becoming the ability to look across a variety of different reports from diverse sources and tell the common overarching story.  I’m used to telling the consumer’s story.  It’s not a linear process.  It involves lots of reading, studying and synthesizing.  Some tools help guide the process.

Gayle had a great “Analysis Work Flow” slide that advocated that the researcher first understand the core questions, then the desired learnings or insights, the business value, then the priority and the data sets that need to be looked at.  This helps her identify next steps when looking at data.  I’m excited to see new enablers for looking at disparate sets of data.  So, if you’re looking at lots of data, what enablers do you use?  I’d love to know!