Disqus - Latest Comments for jeffreyhenning

Re: Metrics And The Placebo Effect

Jeffrey Henning — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 22:08:31 -0000

Great point, Tom. I have seen bad metrics work wonderful changes for companies, and I've seen rigorous metrics fail to improve businesses.

I wonder if someone at Intuit, after reviewing their own research discrediting Net Promoter Score, didn't decide that it was a wonderful placebo and they were going to keep taking it.

Re: Numbers

Jeffrey Henning — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 12:03:57 -0000

Quick, somebody who has all the albums do a tally by album!

Re: Social Media Isn't a Job? I'm Not So Sure.

Jeffrey Henning — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 09:32:39 -0000

I have to disagree with Doug. I don't think this is a transitional role--I think this is the beginning of a new class of marketing specialist that will be with us for decades to come. Other professionals in a company will dabble, but these specialists will do the hard work day in, day out.

Re: The Future Of Research: 10 Odd Ideas

Jeffrey Henning — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:07:23 -0000

Nothing quite as visionary as you've outlined, but I think people will have demographic profiles that can be connected to research explicitly or implicity. LinkedIn does this with its polling today; perhaps eventually when taking a survey respondents can just provide a URL to a profile that will read demographic data rather than prompting for it.

Re: Black Hat Research

Jeffrey Henning — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:37:23 -0000

I think black-hat research is already leaking into our conferences, by people who don't know any better: the SNS platform guy who said market researchers should market more and, when pressed by the chairman, made it clear he did not know what sugging meant; the platform vendor selling MROCs for accelerating marketing; and the many speakers who violated participants' privacy.

Re: The hidden secrets of market research

Jeffrey Henning — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:34:03 -0000

Thanks, I know a few entrepreneurs who thneed this!

Seriously, this is a great call to action for entrepreneurs. I've seen products built before feature requirements analysis, pricing research done before market opportunity analysis, and market opportunity analysis done before qualitative research into buyer behavior.

Re: The Problem Of Influence

Jeffrey Henning — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:54:45 -0000

Social media monitoring tools typically oversimplify and just say that influence is the number of followers (in Twitter), friends (in Facebook) or Technorati rank (blogs). All so that they can then weight sentiment by influence.

In survey research, I've seen some WOM questions that quantify how many people you actually recommended a company to, with that used as a standin for influence.

Re: Ratings Bias Effects

Jeffrey Henning — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:16:25 -0000

I think this analysis neglects the importance of random sampling vs. convenience sampling, which is used by almost all reputation systems. As a result, such ratings are not representative of the much larger group of site visitors that hasn't given a rating.

I would think the ideal rating system would have maximum dispersion: 20% of each star rating, for instance: a line, rather than a curve. Wouldn't that be preferable?

Re: Community Panels And Troubled Brands

Jeffrey Henning — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 11:44:35 -0000

Reminds me of the old saying: "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer!" When your brand is disparaged in your brand's own community, other members are likely to leap to your defense, when appropriate. If they do pile on, then you know you have a serious issue you need to address. With your own community, though, you can shepherd discussions so that you learn even more than you can from listening to random tweets.

Re: Guidebook: How to Conduct Market Research

Jeffrey Henning — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 10:07:47 -0000

A great introduction to the subject for the small businessperson! I would encourage entrepreneurs to do a random sample of *all* customers: contrasting the answers of large customers to those of small customers can reveal some important insights that will help you better target potential large customers in the future. Further, it will encourage you to come up with ways to turn small customers into large customers.

Re: Data Without Analysis Is Like...

Jeffrey Henning — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:24:17 -0000

Data without analysis is like a card catalog without a library. Data without analysis is like a sandbox without a sand castle.

Re: The Death Of The Research Project

Jeffrey Henning — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:13:12 -0000

Tom, I actually think this is the continuation of a trend that we saw start with web surveys. Initially, researchers converted traditional phone projects to web projects. But, then, as the implications of the Web dawned on them, that project evolved into a process: first, it became a tracking study (sold as a service) because once the survey was programmed there was little incremental cost to collecting more responses (typically from the researcher's clients' customers or site visitors); then, it became a business process, piping data into CRM or BI systems or being used to escalate dissatisfied customers to the attention of company reps. Now, with online communities, we're seeing the same thing happen to a focus group: first, a client thinks about a "temporary" online community for a six-week span to gather research for a product launch; then the researcher begins to think about making the community a standing asset providing insight into the clients' decisions big and small.

In the long run, I think this model is better financially for all of us in the industry. Researchers really do evolve from vendors to standing partners, with much greater stability to their own revenues.