Time is not on our side

It occurred to me recently that I can go to any of the popular income tax sites and file my taxes in less time than it takes to complete the average survey; and I'm talking about the real average… not the fake one we use to avoid scaring people. This is ludicrous!

Survey length is a huge problem, and our industry collectively lacks the creativity to find solutions and the balls to stand up to our clients and educate them about the need for change.

And why are surveys such a sacred cow in this industry?  If technology succeeded in making income tax preparation shorter and less painful than a survey, then I refuse to believe that there is no shorter and less painful alternative to surveys.

Survey Fail: Insights Worldwide Research

A friend forwarded this gem from Insigths Worldwide Research. The best part; it accepted my answer and allowed me to continue, but in the following question when I typed my answer in the "Other/specify" box it stopped me with a validation prompt that said I can't continue because "This question requires an answer." The survey was full of screw-ups like these ... and someone paid for it. Shame on you IWR! 

The Paradox of Choice

Malcolm Gladwell says choice is the key to happiness.

Barry Schwartz says choice leads to paralysis.

Both are right. The ability to make our own choices is essential to feeling free and in control of our lives, and therefore a prerequisite for happiness. Too much choice and we become overwhelmed; the abundance of choice raises our expectations, lowers our satisfaction with the outcome of our choices, and we start over-thinking everything. That's where the Net comes in.

The great breakthrough of the Net is not the amount or information that is available or the fact that it allows people to connect with one another in so many ways regardless of where they live. The true value of the Net is in how it enables us effortlessly navigate vast amounts of information and manage choices on a scale previously unimaginable.

Think about it. You expect that you should be able to Google anything and you expect all the relevant information about that topic to be found and displayed for you in fractions of a second. It doesn't matter if Google returns 610,000,000 results, you know you that 19 times out of 20 you will find what you are looking for in the first few clicks. Tools like Facebook make it easy to connect and communicate with dozens or even hundreds of people. Zentact surfs the web alongside you, tells you when you come across something that would interest one of your contacts, then let's you easily share it with that person. And speaking of stumbling, StumbleUpon exposes you to all kinds of hidden gems on the Net by making all the choices for you. These things would have sounded like science fiction in the not too distant past, but the abundance of information on the Net would be useless if the Net wasn't so good at making us feel that we can consistently make good choices with minimal effort.

The Net is shifting the ground beneath our feet. People expect the irrelevant information to be filtered out by default; they expect everything they encounter on the Net to add value to their day; they expect it to be easy; they expect it to require a minimal time investment. So how do you think they feel when they find themselves in the middle of a 30 minute survey where most of the questions are irrelevant, long grids, or things they already told you in a previous survey? The Net has raised the bar and we blissfully ignore the new rules while we puzzle over rising panel attrition and declining response rates. If you want an idea of how a typical survey looks in the context of a typical Net session, just imagine Lucy & Desi appearing in the middle of your favorite TV show to tell you “you'll be glad tomorrow, if you smoke Philip Morris today.”

Not everyone believes in the value of the net

Whether you agree with him or not, Pete Mosley's response to Mitch Joel's sell ideas not products post is an awesome rant.

"Well given the above - so much for that plan!

Too funny.

Selling is critical to success. The Net - I agree with you- ain't that space.

Sadly as the unwashed teeming millions get online it has unfortunately devalued the experience. There has to be some algorithm that shows that exponential devaluation by the thousand of moron that comes online (Especially as an expert)

No I am not an elitist. This should be where every single person on the planet communicates. But right now it is where seemingly most of these unwashed are just shouting at me. And you. And you. And, yep you too!

I am tempted after 20 years online to drop off.

I started in the late '80s on BBS systems - then some early peer -to-peer then the web, then Level 4 interactive places then, and then etc etc

And all it has ended up with is... cheap TV, Ron Popiel type hucksterism and social media - that is anything BUT social.

I look at the top X number of the Twits out there.

No one has a job. No one has a client - they are trying to make money showin the other folks how to get popular by being popular.

I don't see any value in that quite frankly.

I see no clear knowledge leadership and certainly no subjects that matter to me.

I see lots of "How to make a gazillion dollars makin a Podcast about makin a million dollars makin a podcast"

I see How to blog about how to blog.

Wow. How droll.

Tell me about the state-of-the-art in customer relations in Telco.

Tell me about how to develop customer lifetime value in a resort or vacation industry.

Tell me about how a car dealer can fight in this market to win share

Tell me how an electronics company would fight outsourcing and use domestic production as a strategic tool.

I list these cause they are only some of the Google Alerts I have - it is embarrassing cause in all the alerts - and all the RSS and all the Twitts and Blogs ...nothin.

I would do a Google Alert on How to be a net celeb but my inbox would explode!

No knowledge capital. Just folks trying to get popular by bein popular.

Hey, kids - get a job.

I am going back to my helpin my clients.

This thing called the "Web" ain't lookin all that good.

More like Vegas in 1977. And trust me being an old guy I saw in 1977. it wasn't pretty.

And a few of my clients see this and boy does it make my job difficult trying to explain that what they see is the stuff at the surface - like a scab - and there are wonderful bits but ya gotta dig.

Clients hate that. Damn."

What's the worst that could happen?

I know many talented people who want to be more outspoken at work, but are paralyzed by fear.

Fear of what? If you hate the way things are, and you realize that your company is dying a slow death, and you have ideas that could make things better, then you have nothing to lose.

The worst possible outcome is that you won’t get fired, nothing will change, and you’ll be back to where you started.

A few things worth thinking about

Mitch Joel says build email lists, don't rent them.

Seth Godin says you're boring.

Joseph Pine knows what consumers want.

ARF Chief Research Officer Joel Rubinson announced the research revolution last August in a blog post titled Transforming Research: Are You Listening? In the 5 months since the only visible signs of progress are 3 more blog posts containing mentions of "transformation" ... so I can't help but ask, Joel: Are You Doing Anything More Than Talking About It?

Do Some Good

Off topic, but an idea worth spreading: Seth Godin has some suggestions for National Day of Service and beyond.

The Importance of Voice

If you want to talk to people online – REAL PEOPLE – then you better be ready to speak like a human being. One of the main problems with surveys is the voice. Most questionnaires are written in a dense, academic voice. Here is a great example of a mental root canal from QuestionPro: 

When thinking about Data Mining Technologies, Inc. (DMT), do you believe that the word "innovative" aptly describes or poorly describes the company? On a scale of +5 to -5 with +5 being "very good description of DMT" and -5 being "poor description of DMT," how do you rank DMT according to the word "innovative"?

(+5) Describes very well

(+4)

(+3)

(+2)

(+1)

Innovative

(-1)

(-2)

(-3)

(-4)

(-5) Poorly Describes

Would YOU last through 15-20 minutes of THAT? Then how can you expect several hundred people to do it for your study?

The voice of the Internet is conversational at its most formal, and colloquial the rest of the time. Face it, your surveys sound like interrogations. You will have more success and less need for incentives if you stop using the voice that makes you sound smart in meetings, and start using the voice you use for telling stories to your friends. Think about the recent Mac vs. PC ads. Which one of those two guys would you rather spend half an hour talking to?

Survey Fail

If you make an embarassing mistake in a paper, telephone, or in-person survey it's unlikely anyone except you and your respondents will ever know about it. Online is different. There is even a special colloquialism for exposing survey errors: Survey Fail.

LogicDepot asks moms to estimate how many children they have given birth to

Southwest Airlines lies about incentives

digg doesn't know who their competitors are

Kashi is confused about gender

The Forces of Mediocrity Part Deux

I'm not saying the Dunning-Kruger effect is the whole explanation for the forces of mediocrity ... but most of the people I know who fit one description also fit the other.

The Forces of Mediocrity

Mike MacLeod wonders why those of us who 'get it' haven't been able to do more to fix online MR.  I tend to agree with Seth Godin's theory:

There's a myth that all you need to do is outline your vision and prove it's right—then, quite suddenly, people will line up and support you.

In fact, the opposite is true. Remarkable visions and genuine insight are always met with resistance. And when you start to make progress, your efforts are met with even more resistance. Products, services, career paths... whatever it is, the forces for mediocrity will align to stop you, forgiving no errors and never backing down until it's over.

Acting as individuals makes it easy for the forces of mediocrity to band against us. By getting the issues and ideas out in the open we will start to change popular opinion. Once the movement gains enough momentum, the forces of mediocrity will fall in line. 

Safe is the New Dangerous

Kary Mullis is a 64 year old surfer who also happens to have won a Nobel Prize for inventing PCR, a technique that reinvented biochemistry and microbiology, and paved the way for the Human Genome Project. He is as anti-establishment as Nobel Laureates get. In many ways he embodies, in the context of the science community, the subversive spirit of the Internet.

Mullis credits his Nobel-winning breakthrough to his natural disregard for dogma and authority in general. As a boy he ordered an amateur rocketeering book from the US Air Force, and by doing exactly what the book told him NOT to do, he succeeded in building a rocket that could repeatedly fly his pet frogs out of sight and parachute them back to earth alive. The idea for PCR came to him while driving his car, and when his molecular biologist friends advised him to abandon it because it would never work he ignored them and went on to make history.

His method is to have an idea, skip the step where you consult what the established authorities say about it, go into the lab and make it work, then look for ways to improve it. This is also how online companies work. It works because the cost of failure is so incredibly low. If you experiment long enough you will eventually succeed and along the way you will learn a lot of things no one else knows. The Establishment wants us to believe we have to play by their rules, that trial and error is a bad thing, that their conventional wisdom is the only path to success. They want us to play it safe, because their authority comes from the fact that most people don't remember a time before the Establishment so we fall in line and follow their rules, thereby implicitly affirming their authority without asking for any proof of its legitimacy. They indoctrinate us with fear of failure and rejection, and they use this fear to control us.

The online world is about as developed as 17th century science. We are only taking our first steps toward the age of online enlightenment, and those who would transfer their offline authority online are no different than the clergy who accused scientists of heresy.

There is no such thing as playing it safe online. Safe is the new dangerous.

I hope the parallels to our industry are obvious.

Experienced Executives Need Not Apply

Over the last couple of years, as the evolution of the social web made business-as-usual increasingly more difficult for companies like mine, I have seen many hired guns brought in to right the ship. None of them succeeded.

Every time I was introduced to a new senior manager who was coming in to fix all of our problems the emphasis was always on how much experience they have.

"... 20 years experience developing best of breed solutions … pioneered industry best practices … implemented Six Sigma programs in Fortune 500 companies … etc … etc …"

These are touted as reasons why they are the right person for the job, but in reality this is exactly why they will fall on their face trying to lead an online business. The problem is that experienced executives have gotten to where they are because they succeeded in the offline business environment. The things that led to their success will now prove their undoing.

These people know how to make factories efficient.  They continue to believe that the online divisions of market research companies are factories. They are not. The online world is not driven by mass production & marketing, it’s driven by conversation. It’s much more like an ancient market than a modern one. 

We don’t need more management. We don’t need more efficient business processes. We need fresh ideas and innovation. We need to empower smart people who won’t be mislead by clinging to how things used to work. We need less bureaucracy and more adhocracy. We need to become online companies.

The End is Near for Traditional Media

While there is much talk, and a Hollywood blockbuster in the works, about the 2012 doomsday predictions, Clay Shirky thinks the end is much nearer for traditional media.

As Shirky says in his book: "Management has a hard time destroying parts of its business unless the alternative, obvious to everyone, is that there is no choice."

Here’s hoping Clay is right (as he usually is) and that the social change brought about by the web, coupled with the global economic crisis, will force industry to change for the better in 2009.