Presence and Participation

Presence is nothing without participation.

That should be the mantra for every company or brand that wants to do something on the Net.

Seems like all of them want to tap into the web-craze-du-jour, but very few of them have given any thought to how or why they are going to do it. They get about as far as: we need a Facebook presence; we need a company blog; we gotto get on Twitter; how can we leverage crowdsourcing? We need to BE on these sites! ... don't we?

Well ... not exactly. If you're going to use any of these technologies you better be prepared to participate in the conversation. That's what web 2.0/the social web/whatever-the-hell-you-wanna-call-it is. It's a conversation.

If you are ready to participate, to open up and be real, to contribute something valuable to the conversation, you will thrive.

If you think creating an account on all the popular sites and regurgitating your marketing materials is going to make people care about you or your products ... well, give it a shot and let me know how it goes. My guess is it will be a lot like the time you pissed your pants in first grade; that is to say, the other kids are going to point and laugh at you.

Click, click, POP!

Yesterday Jeff Henning pointed out that clickherding is a big business. This is true. Clickherding is also an industry that exploits users and creates no real value for anyone except the sleazebags who profit from it. My gut and common sense tell me it's an over-inflated bubble that's just about ready to pop.

If you depend on clickherding for profit or web traffic you need to give your head a shake. The Net routes around problems, and web users are starting to realize clickherding is a problem. 

The Net is the means, not the end. More on that later.

Definition: Clickherding

Clickherding is what I have started to call the practice of driving vast numbers of sheeple to a web page, usually with deceptive advertising, in the hopes that you will somehow profit if some of them click on something.

You are probably clickherding if:

• the traffic coming to your page contains more sheeple than people
  
• your traffic sources include Lead Gen websites or affiliate networks
  
• the thing you are offering on your website is not good enough to attract organic traffic
  

Clickherding is typically exploitative, unsustainable, and inherently evil.

Sony alarm clock

A couple of weeks ago I was thoroughly amused by The Onion's poke at Sony. They described a Sony product with "impossible to use controls" that "doesn't do the goddamned thing it's supposed to do" and "flashes random letters and numbers on the display." Friends, I have found it!

Instructions for setting the alarm on a Sony Dream Machine:

MORAL FOR SURVEY RESEARCH: ... I tried it once, but as soon as I realized it was taking too long and way more difficult than it needed to be, I gave up and moved on to something better. Your panelists are doing the same.

Worst presentation ever

I recently sat through a truly horrible presentation. The market researcher was presenting the results of a survey about a technology she knows nothing about to a room full of technology experts. It was genuinely painful to watch.

The promise of good research is that it will tell a great story. When we don't understand enough about the industry we are presenting to, or the issues that are important to them, we resort to describing the numbers, and that's simply not good enough.

Everyone in that room walked away feeling like their time had been wasted, and they were right. This was the result of blatant greed on the part of the research agency. If you're not the right person for the job it's better to refer your client to someone else than to butcher the project and taint the reputation of the industry.

Do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons

Barry Schwartz's TED2009 talk is an idea worth spreading. We must promote virtue, integrity, and practical wisdom in our society. This is the real solution to the symptoms of bureaucracy, and a big part of what is needed to solve the problems facing our companies, our economy, and our planet.

 

P.S. If you know anyone on the Nielsen Executive Council, please ask them to watch Barry's talk. I'm hoping it will inspire them to give the Reply-all button back to their poor employees and consider other ways of dealing with bureaucracy. 

Paid Surveys Etc. dot scam

I hate sites like this. And I'm going to start calling them out as I find them.

People like Sylvia are also part of the problem, but ultimately the failure is ours. As long as there are MR companies offering money for surveys, sites like PaidSurveysEtc will continue to exploit naive web users and tarnish our reputation.

The sad truth is that these scam sites do a better job of marketing themselves than we do, so they have become synonymous with online surveys. We indirectly finance these scammers, and if we want to fix our online reputation we need to take responsibility for protecting internet users from them.

Web 2.0 is dead

It seems like most MR people just heard about this new fangled web two-point-zero thing in the last few months and now they're throwing it around proudly like they invented it. I bet many of them still wear their Members Only jackets on the weekend.

Newsflash: Web 2.0 is dead! Please stop saying it. It's really annoying. It was a cliche long before you knew about it. You think it makes you sound informed and relevant, but it only exposes your ignorance.

Here are some current buzzwords you can use to impress your colleagues and clients (Best Before Q2 2009): Epic Fail, Maverick, Semantic Web, Recessionista, Twitterverse, Blagojevich, Crowdsourcing, Lipstick on a Pig, Golden Parachutes, TBTF. 

If you build it, they will come

Instead of trying to find people to survey, build a worthwhile experience and they will find you.

If you are reading this, you've proven my point. I didn't look for you; I didn't advertise; I didn't offer an incentive for you to read my blog. I just started writing about things I care about and you found me.

Giving their opinion is something people love to do on the Net, and you don't have to pay them for it. You need only look at the explosion of blogging and microblogging sites as proof of that. Yet our industry's web buffoonery and misuse of technology has hard-wired people to think: survey = something I don't want to do.

If you want to create an engaging web experience you have to:

1. Make it relevant
2. Make it easy
3. Give the user control

This is why Albert Kim's Twitter panel idea is a winner. The technology exists, and the people who know how to harness it are already in our companies. What we lack is the will to admit the current situation is a clusterfuck; to pull our heads out of our asses and take control away from the offline dinosaurs who moved into the online departments when they saw the growth potential; to get out of the way and empower the right people for the job to do what they're good at.

History says this kind of change is impossible, but the promise of the Net gives me hope. We can do it, and we need you to lead a tribe that will help get us there.

You need a tribe

Seth Godin explains to Loic Le Meur why everyone who wants to change the world needs a tribe.

For you and me this means a tribe of colleagues who will help us fight the forces of mediocrity in our company, a tribe of peers to collaborate with on fixing our industry, a tribe of consumers who will embrace new ways of participating in market research.

If you're still not sold on the concept of tribes, check out Tribes.

Hat tip: Albert Kim

Hat tip to Albert Kim for helping MR take a small step in the right direction.

His idea to build an opt-in feedback panel of Twitter users won the Silicon Alley contest to develop a revenue model for Twitter.

This is one small step for a clued-in man like Albert, a giant leap for an industry that isn't very good at figuring out how to harness new technology.

The Dead Sea Effect

Hat tip to "Dr. Dre" for finding this.

Bruce Webster's description of the Dead Sea Effect is remarkable because it's such common sense once you've read it, but then you stop to think: if it's that simple, why are large organizations so powerless to prevent it?

The theory goes something like this: as companies grow bad hiring practices and bad management breeds a culture of bureaucracy and stagnation that results in all the good people leaving and only the worst employees sticking around. The worse things get, the more the incompetent employees entrench themselves by latching on to mission critical tasks that will make it hard to get rid of them. In turn, it becomes increasingly more difficult to bring good people in, because as soon as they see what's going on they bail.

Bruce observed this in IT organizations, but I can tell you the Dead Sea Effect is alive and well in every department within my company, and probably yours too.

Another one bites the dust?

Looks like Synovate might be swallowed up by GfK in the near future. Does that mean they're going to remake the rapping CEO video in German with everyone wearing orange?

I think all the mergers and acquisitions are partly to blame for the industry's problems. The whole thing has become depressingly inbred and half baked. The same people bounce around from company to company, bringing the same stale ideas and failed solutions with them. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Ironically, I think that when it comes to Online MR, someone will win big by staying small. There are advantages to being small. It's much easier to find 30 amazing people who are passionate about their work than it is to find 3,000 of them. It's easier to keep bureaucracy in check when everyone in the company knows everyone else on a first name basis. Staying small means you can move fast. It means there is no sense or entitlement, and no fear of making mistakes. All of these things are must-haves is you want to succeed online. So you either have to be the first big company to develop small company virtues, or the small company that comes out of nowhere and changes everything. Which of those two would you say is more likely to happen?

Get real!

The Net is all about being real; about acting and speaking like a real human being. That is why people like it. After decades of sitting in front of the television having fake people shout catch phrases and slogans at us, the Net just feels right. It's filling a void we didn't even realize existed, but now we can't imagine life any other way.

The voice of corporations is carefully crafted, revised and vetted by teams of marketers and lawyers, and the end result is a lifeless pseudo-legalese drone that is repulsive to human beings. Sad to say, but WALL-E has a lot more soul than the average corporation.

You can't make real connections with your customers as long as you sound like the Borg? So get real! Companies are made of human beings who have been assimilated and silenced by the hive mind. Let your humans out; your customers will love you for it.

Marketing is not the same as advertising

Great post from Seth Godin. Here is a taste:

Marketing is not the same as advertising. Advertising is a tiny slice of what marketing is today, and in fact, it's pretty clear that the marketing has to come before the product, not after. As Jon points out, the Prius was developed after the marketing thinking was done. Jones Soda, too. In fact, just about every successful product or service is the result of smart marketing thinking first, followed by a great product that makes the marketing story come true.

Interview with a professional respondent

This disguised Professional Respondent got her start working the UK focus group scene, but in the middle of the interview she got a tip about online panels. By now she's probably taking your surveys.

Best quote "...you just go in there to earn your cash and go. You don't care too much about what they're discussing."

Seven words you can't say in Market Research

I'm sure you know the seven words you can't say on television, but what about the seven you can't say in a Market Research company: "We know our surveys include professional respondents."

Tom Anderson makes a good point about the impact of professional survey takers  on panel sample prices and the possibility that without them there would be no one left to complete long surveys.

Many have tried to solve this problem. Peanut Labs spent the better part of 2008 hyping up their Optimus technology. I applaud their energy, but they've wasted it on building a complicated solution for the wrong problem. We can't win the war against professional survey takers, and I'm not sure we want to.

As long as there is a financial incentive, the bad guys will find a way to get around our defenses. They get in, we build a bigger fence, they figure out a new way to break through it, rinse, repeat. It's a virtual arms race with no end; just like the spammers and the anti spammers; just like the virus writers and the anti virus people.

Even if we could get rid of professional respondents, we'd be jumping out of the pot and into the fire.

Before we get to the real solution, let's define the real problem. Our surveys are so long, boring, and ugly, that the only way we can get people to participate is to bribe them.

The endgame is simple. Forget about professional respondents. Abolish long, stale, nausea inducing surveys. Replace them with quick, fun, engaging and user friendly data collection technologies that real people will be delighted to use without an incentive. If we fix the survey problem, the professional respondent problem will take care of itself.

Wag of the finger: Nielsen Executive Council

When I first read this in TechCrunch I thought it was a joke ... sadly it's not. For fighting bureaucracy with more bureaucracy, Nielsen get's a wag of my finger!

Outlook doesn't cause inbox clutter, people do. Claiming that they're going to fix the problems of bureaucracy and inefficiency by disabling an Outlook feature proves only that the Nielsen Executive Council doesn't understand the sheepwalking culture that has taken root or how to change it.