Movin' on up

If you don't know you're living in the ghetto, how can you ever hope to get out?

That is a question you should be asking yourself right now because MR is ghetto as it gets on the Internet. We're living next door to sharks pushing payday loans and just a few blocks from fake Canadian pharmacies selling discounted boner pills and Nigerian spammers who want to make lucky Westerners rich.

There are two kinds of for-profit websites: 1) sites that provide a valuable service and monetize their traffic through advertising, e-commerce or subscription fees, and 2) sites that hustle, scam, or otherwise exploit naive web users by luring them in with promises of cash, prizes, porn, or other rewards. We are in the second group.

This is why only 1% of the online population will take a survey. This is why we can't get deep access to social data. We stampede the online trailer park over to our websites by announcing free BBQ and beer, hoping that once they realize they've been duped a few will still take our survey, join our panel, or register for our community... please, can someone explain to me how we concluded this was a good idea? The tragedy is we made it work; badly, but well enough to convince our management and clients that everything is copacetic.

We were already a large and mature industry when the lure of cheaper-faster-more brought us to the Internet. Driven by a heady mix of profits and inertia we jumped for joy as suppliers lined up around the block to sell us potential respondents for fractions of a penny a piece. Instead of adapting to our new environment we restricted ourselves to the sliver of the Internet that was willing to work on our terms, then we focused our brightest minds on defending the validity of the data.

The online research respondent universe is 98% online hobos, 1% hackers trying to game our reward systems, and 1% survey geeks. None of us can admit this publicly, but deep down we all know it's true.

Some of these problems are solved by social listening in all its various forms and names, but a new problem emerges: we are restricted to public data and thus know little or nothing about the people we are listening to. We are grasping at farts in a football stadium.

The time has come to admit that online MR is a pig and no amount of Flash, HTML5, or social media lipstick is going to fly this piggy to an East Side de-luxe apartment in the sky. I'm not saying we don't need better technology, we do, but updating our web tech is just the first step in a thousand mile journey and we would be foolish to think animated survey pages or licensing a social platform even begins to address the real problem...

Participants get no value out of online MR. None. Zilch. Cash is the wrong currency when you want someone to give you their honest opinion or access to their personal data. There is no good reason any normal person (test this by asking 5 of your family members) would take the time to complete a 10 minute questionnaire, let along a much longer one. We can make surveys a little more palatable by making them prettier, shorter, mobile, social and more relevant... but until we deliver some sort of real value to participants we are confined to the shrinking puddle of web rubes and survey geeks. Given the demand to move more research online, the 1%-spray-and-pray approach will not be a viable option for much longer.

A winning strategy for online MR must be supported by three pillars.

1. Great technology
2. Delivering genuine value to participants
3. Fostering participant trust by cultivating meaningful relationships

It is only by delivering value and establishing user trust that we can hope to access real people and their data for research purposes. Think Google. Think Facebook. Think LinkedIn. Think Hunch. These companies have vast amounts of detailed user data and enough credibility to command their users' attention. Even when privacy concerns come up it blows over quickly and very few users leave because they want and need what they get from these sites. That's the model we need to emulate... or partner with.