Wag of the Finger: VisualCV

A few weeks ago I followed a link from Guy Kawasaki's blog to VisualCV. First impression was good so I registered, but I haven't been back since.

Today I got a survey invite from VisualCV ... I couldn't resist. Everything was going pretty well until question 14. 

The question was "Where do you live?" and the options were: any of the 50 United States, Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, or South America ... but wait a minute! What happens if I live in Mexico, or Canada, the Caribbean, or one of the Central American countries ... Holy Kaw! They all got shafted and somehow Antarctica made the list ... really?

VisualCV and Zoomerang, for getting basic geography wrong in the age of Google Maps, and for snubbing the wonderful people who brought us such marvelous things as Canadian bacon, maple syrup, tacos, burritos, and all-inclusive island vacations ... an extra stern wag of my finger for you!

Too many twits on Twitter

The bigger it gets, the more I lose confidence in Twitter's staying power. The technology isn't the problem, people are.

Like most of the things that came before it, Twitter has devolved into a popularity contest with no real purpose. People follow lots of other people in hopes those people will follow them back ... because they need to have lots of followers ... and then what? Most people are only following you as a courtesy because you followed them or in hopes that you will follow them. But why? Once you're following a large number of people it becomes impossible to keep up with what all those people are saying, and everyone else is having the same problem. 

Doesn't this mean that most of your followers don't see and don't care about what you're saying; that Twitter is a conversational crapshoot; that you might as well just go to a public place and start shouting?

What is the Twitter endgame? As the Twitterverse gets diluted with trend followers seeking easy (even if false) affirmation and brands just looking for access to eyeballs, is there any real benefit to Twitter that will keep the masses using it after the novelty wears off?

[Update] I should add ... there are still good things about Twitter and people worth following on Twitter. Unfortunately, like most things, mass adoption will ruin it.

Yet another way we drive people away

Friday night - 7:35pm - survey invite arrives in my mailbox.

Saturday morning 10:30am-ish .... survey closed.

With the odd stacked so heavily against us can we really afford to do this to the few people still willing to take our surveys?

The Century of the Self

Huge hat tip to @tomewing. I can't believe I didn't come across this series sooner.

If you haven't seen it, you need to see it. It's fascinating, scary, and will explain a lot of things you always loosely associated in your mind but could never quite put your finger on exactly how they fit together.

Each episode is an hour long, so you'll need to set aside some time and temporarily control your ADD.

Part 1 - Happiness Machines

Part 2 - The Engineering of Consent

Part 3 - There is a Policeman Inside all our Heads

Part 4 - Eight People Sipping Wine

This is making me rethink how I'm approaching a lot of things. Appealing to logic and reason hasn't been working as well as I had hoped ... maybe it's time to borrow from the toolboxes of Freud and Bernays.

The Diseconomies of Scale

Why does everyone continue to assume bigger is always better? Sometimes big is bad. I think this is part of why trying to replicate traditional research online doesn't work.

To win online you have to move fast; you have to take risks; you have to listen to your gut; you have to listen to people who are younger & less experienced & wear sandals to the office -- even in winter -- because they are the experts; you have to do all the things that big companies are not good at.

I think it's safe to say that so far all efforts to assign people to be online innovators within the traditional big company structure have failed. So why not segregate the sandbox from the factory? Let the research factory keep chugging along as it always has, but for innovation and online user engagement try something completely different.

Here is my idea. Big company acts like an angel investor for internal startups. The money is reallocated from existing programs that don't work ... like Lead Gen. And by being inside an established company there are huge overhead savings for the startups, so less funding needed.

The startups organize themselves, they can consist of existing employees or new people or a combination of both, they pitch the Company Online Angel(s), get some seed money if they succeed, then they do their own thing. If it takes off great, the big company already owns it and can integrate it. If it flops, you can drop the project and people involved like a bad habit. If the people are worth keeping you reabsorb them into the organization.

I think it could work. When big companies acquire small companies they leave them alone for a couple of years even though all kinds rules and policies are being broken. That freedom is needed for the acquired company to deliver the growth and profit they projected. That same freedom is needed for real online innovation to happen in big companies.

Hello my name is 1100 112th Avenue NE Suite 100 Bellevue, WA 98004

You would never introduce yourself to someone in the real world by reciting your mailing address, so why are you doing it to your online panelists?

If anyone from GMI is listening, please add a display name to your GlobalTestMarket survey invites. Here is what your panelists see when they receive one of your emails:

It's cold, robotic, impersonal, generic, and it gives me the urge to delete it without opening.

80% of people decide whether or not to open an email based on who the sender is. Introduce yourself to your panelists with a name, not some generic email alias. Something they will remember and recognize, and use that name consistently in all of your email communications. It's a small thing and so easy to do, but it makes a difference.

Wag of the finger: LinkedIn Polls

I have to take back part of my hat tip to LinkedIn and replace it with a wag of the finger.

Today I got the same poll I answered yesterday. I still like the LinkedIn Polls concept, but don't ask me the same question twice.

Tip of the hat: LinkedIn Polls

This works because the MR is embedded inside of something I like and need. LinkedIn solves one of my real world problems; it helps me maintain my professional network. I'm happy to give them all kinds of profile information because I'm getting something I want in return ... and if the poll is about something I care about I don't mind taking 10 seconds out of my day to answer it. The rest of the time the poll widget sits there patiently and doesn't bother me.  With over 8 million users they don't have to be pushy to get enough responses ... and that makes all the difference in the world. Great user experience + long tail = better online MR!

I think this kind of research has a future.

Dinosaurs, dodo birds, newspapers ... but maybe not Market Research

I see many parallels between what is happening in our industry and Clay Shirky's take on the past, present, and future of journalism. More importantly, I see that we are now where newspapers were 15 years ago. We can learn from their mistake and change our outcome.

We are aware that there is some general threat which requires us to change and we're drawing up a bunch of schemes and plans, all of which assume we'll still continue doing basically the same thing in a slightly different way ... but we refuse to consider that the unthinkable scenario is real.

"[Employees] who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse." I see it happening to people all around me. It's happening to me. 

What we need more than anything is to allow experimentation. Stop trying to fit new ideas into old moulds. Stop diluting your best talent by forcing them to work with the old guard inside the existing org structures. Stop assuming that the future includes the factory you are operating today.

Web technology is cheap, and the few good people you already have can get a lot more done if you just get the hordes bureaucrats out of their way.

We don't need the people at the top to come down from the mountain and do it for us; they just need to let it happen.

Survey Fail: Global Test Market Auto Insurance Survey

This one was a doosie. About a dozen insurance brands, each wanting to know how well they are described by a list of 20 attributes ... most of which don't make any sense. How the hell can "Variety" describe an auto insurance company? Is there really such a thing as "Upper-Class" auto insurance? An insurance company can be "Masculine"??? "Trendy"??? "Spirited"??? Who writes this shit?

On a scale from 1 to 7 where 1 is "No chance in hell" and 7 is "Extremely likely," please note how likely you are to answer any more of our surveys. Me: 1 ... but they didn't ask that. It's a shame; that question would have been relevant.

The Net is the means, not the end

The technology is just an enabler; it's meant to solve real world problems. We need to start thinking about it beyond views and clicks.

MIT's Sixth Sense device gives us a glimpse of what is possible.

Now is the time to start thinking how MR fits into that future. If we wait until mass adoption we will miss the cluetrain once again.

Everything is amazing, nobody is happy

It's funny because it's true.

People expect a lot from technology, and if we think the current generation takes it for granted ... the next generation will expect perfection. Unless, of course, Louis CK is right and the global recession gets so bad we have to trade our iPhones and Big Macs in for donkeys and stale bread.

The only people willing to put up with our crappy technology are the people responsible for that technology being so crappy; us.

There are so many reasons for the trouble we have getting people to do surveys, so why compound those problems with technology that drives people away?

If your technology sucks, fix it! That is the only part of building a worthwhile user experience that's relatively straightforward.

Who are you?

Paul Worthington says that brands are incompatible with social media because they don't understand themselves well enough to engage in real conversations. Makes sense to me.

You get what you give

And in the context of big brands using social media, that usually turns out to be ... nothing.

I was discussing this with a friend recently and he paraphrased my long winded rant perfectly: "It's like a bank account; you have to make a deposit before you can make a withdrawal." Exactly!

Mitch Joel titled his post about the same idea "Give first."

It's amazing how selfish and stupid we (MR companies) are being about this. We treat our respondents with the same respect miners give to coal; just a resource to be exploited. These are human beings. They deserve better.

If you want people to talk to you, all you have to do is prove that you're interesting to talk to. You don't need to pay them, or give them points or prizes. If someone is only willing to give you their opinion in exchange for money, how much is that person's opinion worth?

We are where we are because we've taken every possible shortcut to maximize out profits at the expense of the user experience. To thrive online we will have to put the user experience first, and then figure out how to be profitable without screwing it up.

Tip of the Hat: Bad Research; No Biscuit.

Great blog! I can't believe I only came across it today, and quite accidentally when I saw a rather intriguing name among my new Twitter followers.

Whoever the author is; kudos and thank you.  It's excellent!

My favorite post so far is the one about understanding that when you strip away all the bullshit only researchers care about, a survey is a conversation with a human being ... so why are we screwing it up so badly?

Existentialism 2.0

What is the web really all about? Where is it going? Is it all held together with duct tape?

Brian Sterling has some interesting thoughts on these and other subjects. Long, but well worth reading. Hat tip to Mose for finding this.