Day 2 AM: CASRO International Conference

Back for Day 2. Mike Cooke is kicking us off again. He is arguing that we have come to rely too much on quant and that the whole social network thing is a reinvention of the older qual methods. He sees quant as "the industrialization of research" and believes that in the process we have lost something in terms of our ability to elicit truth. I suppose that at one level this about precision and the level that we need to make decisions. What level of certainty do clients need? Tough question.

The first speaker is Dan Shapero from LinkedIn who is going to talk about social networks. He has started with the stats which are very impressive. They are up to 40 million members (half international) and getting another two million every month. All in all, impressive reach. Now he is into telling us what it does and how cool it is. Not very interesting until he starts describing a joint venture that they are planning with Twitter that will give LinkedIn users some sort of access to "relevant" Twitter users. The ability to look only at certain kinds of LinkedIn users and thereby get to Twitter subgroups could be very interesting. Finally we are getting to LinkedIn as a B2B sample source. His starting point is that this is much better sample than what we are likely to get elsewhere. People are who they say they are. It's tough to over represent yourself in this kind of system. They did some verification work and were able to validate 98 percent of their sample. My take on all of this is that they have the basis for a terrific product here but they are still figuring out how to leverage it effectively. Pete Cape, Global Knowledge Director at SSI, once observed that "we have allowed MR to be taken over by venture capitalists and IT geeks." That certainly applies here, but they have the potential to provide something very useful although the sense is that they are having trouble figuring out how to do so.

Now we are going to hear from Larry Ponemon, who does a lot of government relations type stuff for CASRO, on the difficult-to-make-interesting topic of global privacy. He is going to report on a study in 19 countries looking at perceptions of privacy by consumers and business people. The top line finding is that privacy is most important in the EU and Canada and less important in the BRICs. The US falls in the middle. He has a lot of interesting data supporting this top line.

This presentation causes me to reflect back on a conversation at breakfast this morning in which Mike Cooke was saying that the EU is on the verge of outlawing targeted marketing and that Canada already has outlawed "digital fingerprinting" as a way to identify duplicate respondents on Web surveys. Point being that the US has not yet been hit by the kind of privacy legislation that is increasingly common in Europe and in Canada, but that may not last. Worries about privacy legislation have sort of ebbed in the US over the last couple of years but I expect the issue will surface again before too long.

Now we will hear from a couple of guys from Greenfield Online (Hugh Davis and Keith Smart). Their topic is emerging technologies for global research. They are starting out by talking about their global reach and their underlying technology. They are into the whole "world is flat" thing, but is it really? Differences in culture, in regulation, in use of technology are just a few things that vary dramatically from country to country although they don't seem to see it that way. But I digress, and they are now into technology trends. They are showing us the Microsoft 2019 video. They are admitting that there are a variety of things that "impact the use of technology" in global research but only at a very high level. There are five things that they see as important in conducting global surveys:

1. Using the cleaning technologies developed for panels in the US on a global scale.
2. Using the right tool and technology platforms.
3. Understand the cultural differences and how they may impact technology use.
4. Recognize how people from across the globe take surveys.
5. Use technology on the back end.

My problem with this presentation is that the presenters make it all seem so easy when, in fact, it is very very difficult. Some people seem to think that we can just project the US panel paradigm to the rest of the world, but even these guys note that in some developing countries we will need to do mobile and in others learn to harvest blogs and social networks, things we are not yet very good at. So all in all this is a technologist's view of global research rather than a researcher's.