This post is a bit late, for which I apologize.
I’m here in Dublin at the Panels Conference. We began the first day by hearing the Program Chairman declare that this was the last panels conference. By that he meant that the next one (if you can draw 200 people like this one ESOMAR will keep having it) will likely have a different focus–communities, Web 2.0, Web 3.0, social media, etc. It seems that panels are passé. Or, to put it another way, panels are paradigm 1 and all of this other cool stuff is paradigm 2.
This was followed by the keynoter, Lorenz Bogaert, founder and CEO of the European social networking site, Netlog a European version of Facebook.. His story is all about another of these social networking sites that have grown up and now have millions of people who sign up, post, and interact with others on all sorts of topics and in all sorts of different ways. Where the principal medium used to be email, it’s now blogs, and video postings, IM and even SMS. The whole question of how we use virtual gathering places to do research was left to another day.
The next speaker: me. I felt like John McCain following Barack Obama. This old gray haired guy still talking about probability sampling (paradigm 0, I guess) and how clients can use paradigm 1 to generate great business insights. Or, the importance of not viewing these new methods as replacement methodologies but rather as complimentary methodologies that each tell us different thing, maybe even using them in combination to tell a full story to clients. Desperately trying to stay relevant, although old friends were very kind with their comments at the lunch break. “Pathetic” is the word that comes to mind.
Then three successive papers on client communities. Lots of nice pictures of Web sites, stories about how much participants love the interaction, and testimonials to business uses. The clients who run these communities do indeed float concepts and ideas in front of members and make decisions about new products and service offerings based on the feedback. While in general the presenters understood the compromises they are making the intensity of the feedback and the speed with which they can get it tips the scales in favor of the approach. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of all of this is the intimacy that gets created between the “research” supplier and the client. Each presentation featured both the supplier and a client and throughout the conference the each of these pairs has been joined at the hip. It’s clear that they interact constantly with one another and it creates a bond and synergy that is envious.
One observation. When pressed, smart researchers will admit that panel research is not really as accurate as traditional probability-based methods but the speed and cost benefits trump that to a point where we are happy to accept “good enough” research. (How is this like or unlike “quick and dirty?”) Communities may be the next stop down on this slippery slope.
Bottom line: interesting but not especially illuminating.
The afternoon started with a client panel. These things seem to flop more often than they work. The clients are all drawn from conference attendees who in general are folks in the trenches rather than more senior people who deal with broad strategy or policy making. So the discussion is rather mundane. About things like whether to use a Back button in surveys.
The next group of papers was more promising: two on conversion of ongoing studies from offline to online and one on mobile. (Sadly, this is about the point when North American began to wake up and my email because a significant distraction.) The two on conversions were mostly disappointing stories about attempts to convert from offline to online and having all sorts of problems producing convincing numbers. One paper title, “Turning the super tanker,” went into a good deal of detail about the infrastructure challenges as well as data quality issues which while interesting struck me as things I heard before. I’m not sure what to make of this but in the place where you are supposed to take notes in the program booklet I wrote, “Not very interesting.” At the conference closing it was nominated as one of the two best papers at the conference.
The best paper of this lot was by Otto Heilwig from Respondi in German. Frankly, I found his presentation to be a bit difficult to follow and I must read his paper more carefully. He seems to have done a pretty well designed experiment that compared use of mobile phones to collect quick reactions to events with use of traditional telephone. I don’t his results from the experiment were all that interesting but the paper did a nice job of pointing out the main challenge to use of mobile phones as a data collection platform. Chief among them is the difficulty of surveys with SMS, and while something close to two-thirds of German mobile phone users have Web-enable phones less than 15 percent use them to access the Internet because it’s just too expensive. During discussion at the evening reception many of us agreed that given current limitations with the devices probably the next phase for mobile will be more around replacing and improving on IVR than on replacing “traditional” online.
So a somewhat interesting day with some food for thought but nothing extraordinary.