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Brainstorming with Word Clouds

By Jim Bryson on January 9, 2010 8:35 AM | No Comments
Last week, I received my 2010 prediction issue of Research Business Review.  There were 12 pages of predictions from all corners of the research industry.  It was overwhelming. I wondered what would happen if I created a word cloud of the entire predictions issue to easily assess the common themes?  I scanned the entire issue and loaded the text into Wordle to create a typical word frequency word cloud (below).
2010 Predictions.png

Then I began to consider the business implications of this compilation.  My mind instinctively began to combine words in an attempt to decipher meaning from this jumble of words.  Suddenly new concepts began to form around those word combinations.  I quickly realized that I was brainstorming trends and opportunities for 2010 from this jumbled mass of relevant words.  The word cloud and the resulting word combinations became an unexpected tool that stimulated brainstorming.  

Look at this word cloud and allow combinations of words to form.  What are their implications?  How do those combinations lead you to insights?  Here are some combinations that pop at me:

  • New Media Companies
  • Media Insights Communities
  • New Social Consumers
  • Consumer Insights Communities
  • Marketing Less Media
  • Continue Technology Promises
  • Understand Traditional Listening
  • See New Consumers
The beauty of using word clouds in this way is that the word cloud prioritizes the concepts (at least the words) that the experts are using but presents them in such a way that the brain has to work to make some sense of it.  That is the process that leads to brainstorming.

As a qual researcher, my mind is spinning on two levels.  First, how can I tactically use Word Clouds in my qualitative research brainstorming?  Second, how can I use Word Cloud Brainstorming in my business planning to tap the wisdom of the crowds of experts to better plan and strategize?

Online Communities: The participants' experience

By Jim Bryson on November 28, 2009 10:34 AM | No Comments
ESOMAR Online Conference
The paper presented at the Conference titled, "It Works for Us but Does It Work for Them," focused on community participants.  The findings were taken from the 17% of these panel members surveyed who had taken part in a community.  Of these, 71% said they "always" or "usually" enjoy participating, so the communities have more positives than negatives.

Generally, participants said they enjoyed participating because communities are a convenient way to provide input on a product or brand and participants felt marketers were truly listening.  Communities are convenient because participants can generally enter and leave when they want and participate as much as they want.  They also liked the fact that they developed familiarity with other community members who they saw there on a regular basis.  Participants also appreciated the optional ability to be anonymous and, presumably, be more honest.

Some of the "dislikes" participants mentioned were the low and uneven distribution of incentives or participation rewards.  Because prize drawings are public, they are open to criticism about fairness.  Participants also questioned the sincerity of some participants, believing that they tended to posture for the marketers than providing true opinions.  

Communities appear to provide strong benefits for participants as well as researchers.  Therefore, they are likely here to stay but will "morph" over time into many different variations. We will continue to watch the community phenomenon unfold along with other techniques to better understand the mind and behavior of the consumer.

How to use SMS for qualitative research

By Jim Bryson on October 30, 2009 10:32 AM | No Comments
I recently wrote an article for Mobile Marketer about the use of text messaging in qualitative research.  The article provides an overview of uses to give those not familiar with the use of text messaging in research a taste of the possibilities.  The article was published today.  Here is a brief excerpt:

More of these researchers who seek to understand the motivations behind decisions and behavior are using text messaging as a tool and finding it holds exciting promise.

No longer must the research be conducted at a time convenient to the researcher. Now the research query can come to the participants in real-time through their mobile devices to glean more reliable and complete information.

Why social media can provide key brand insights

By Jim Bryson on October 27, 2009 2:02 PM | No Comments
ESOMAR Online Conference
The conference is taking place today and tomorrow in Chicago.  The first morning has been heavily focused on social media with several good papers.  I will post more about social media later.  

Annelies Verhaeghe of InSites Consulting in Belgium made an interesting presentation making the case for "netnography."  Netnography is essentially the practice of mining social media and other online sites to see what people are saying about a specific brand.  I have heard it also called "scraping" or "mining" social media.  Though netnography is not a new term to QualBlog, the presentation clearly outlined the case for conducting it.  Ms. Verhaeghe provided a short list of  5 reasons netnography is an important, emerging research field.

  1. Consumers control the conversation -- Researchers can "hear" what consumers say without the researcher bias.
  2. Discover natural language -- Marketers can know linguistic conventions consumers use to refer to the brand.
  3. Find unexpected golden nuggets -- Since the conversation is not controlled, sometimes the findings are more surprising than in a tightly controlled research design.
  4. Back in Time -- the researcher can search the online history to better understand the evolution of a brand from the consumers' perspectives.
  5. Emotions revealed naturally -- consumers are very good at expressing their emotions online, especially when they are talking to "friends."  Researchers can mine these emotions from those conversations.


You Can't be Brilliant Alone: Effective Collaboration

By Jim Bryson on October 13, 2009 2:31 PM | No Comments

Last week, I attended the AMA Research Conference in Palm Springs.  One of the better presentations I witnessed was by Chris Frank, VP of Global Insights for AmEx.  He presented on "Tricks and Techniques" to be a brilliant researcher.  These techniques are built on two trends he sees as pervasive in research.

  1. Research Control becoming Research Collaboration
  2. Education about research becoming Evangelism about research implications

Here are Chris Frank's 7 "Tips and Tricks" to be "Brilliant!"

  1. Be explicitly clear on the essential business question.
  2. Develop hypotheses, test them in the research and report on them.
  3. Practice Smoke Jumping.  Be willing to change the research design at any point to accomodate new findings or explore new questions so that the final report includes complete understanding of the findings and issues.
  4. Reveal surprises.  Ask the question, "What surprised you the most?"
  5. Don't sweat the small stuff.  Miniscule changes are just that miniscule.  Focus on the important findings that are important enough to change decisions. 
  6. Plan and be sprecific in your research meetings.
  7. Make the bottom line the top line.  Put conclusions up front.  Leave the detail for those who want to dig through it.  Display the data to drive the point home.  Be compelling.

These points are changing the way research is designed, managed, reported and used throughout American Express. 

If we all focused on our research in this way, we would be more valuable to the decision-makers in our firm or our client's firms.  This process makes complete sense and focuses everyone on the game-changing research results.

 

Breaking in New Clients

By Jim Bryson on October 1, 2009 11:11 AM | No Comments

Have you ever had an internal or external client who was skeptical about the value of online research, or even research in general?  Chris Kann has recorded a podcast for QRCA that outlines how she used quantitative and online qualitative research to nurture a client relationship that grew to be strong and exciting. 

Chris is the owner of CSK Marketing, Inc. in Racine, Wisconsin.  She has been very active in QRCA having served 4 years on the Board, including one year as President. 

In the podcast, Chris describes how she started the client with small quantitative studies which led to valuable discoveries.  Then she moved them to online qualitative which led to greater discoveries.  Now she has a strong client relationship that benefits her and her client. 

You can find the podcast at: http://qrcabreakthroughs.com/. 

QualBoard 3.0: We've come a long way baby

By Jim Bryson on September 15, 2009 9:45 AM | No Comments

 The late 1990s saw the dot-com boom leading to the dot-com bust of early 2000.  Not to be left in the dust, online qualitative research made its first forays into the online world.  First came chat based focus groups.  They were fairly rudimentary but served a purpose to engage people online from various geographies.  Next, came online bulletin boards that also engaged people but introduced longitudinal qualitative as a research methodology.

In 2000, I connected with Ted Kendall, then a client at US West in Denver and now with TripleScoop.  We discussed the developing online platforms and decided that the bulletin board methodology had the greatest potential.  We formed QualTalk.com and developed its flagship product, QualBoard in 2001.

For several years, acceptance of online qualitative was very slow.  After struggling with acceptance, QualTalk.com was dissolved and 20/20 Research absorbed the QualBoard platform.  20/20 rewrote the platform and re-introduced it to the market.  Still, adoption was slow and resistance to text-based qualitative was high.

About two years ago, acceptance began to build significantly.  Understanding of social media was growing so that researchers began to understand that people can communicate effectively online.  Researchers began to realize that online qualitative is not designed to replace face to face interviewing but to complement it.  They realized that online adds capabilities and benefits not available with face to face.  Online earned a place in the qualitative toolbox.

The online qual industry has grown dramatically and 20/20's involvement has grown as well.  In addition to QualBoard, we now have QualMeeting (webcam interviewing), QualAnywhere (mobile texting), QualJournal (journaling/blogging) and QualLab (usability testing). 

On September 10, 20/20 Research introduced QualBoard 3.0.  The third generation of QualBoard is head and shoulders above anything we have done in the past and leads the industry in ease of use and advanced features specifically for qualitative research.  We are proud of the software and the capabilities it brings to the industry.  For a demo go to:  www.2020research.com and click on the green button. 

The QualBoard 3.0 introductory press release is here:   http://www.2020research.com/2009/09/2020-research-cements-position-as-industry-leader-in-online-qualitative-research---launches-qualboar.html

 

 

What 1.7 million people think of your brand

By Jim Bryson on August 13, 2009 10:50 AM | No Comments

This is PURE fun though you might find a business use for it.  I came across a new site that is related to qualitative research and a lot of fun to boot. 

Brandtags.net is a fun site that shows you a brand/logo and allows you to type in a word or phrase that you associate with that brand (just like in qualitative research).  I spent several minutes in something like a "lightning round" moving through as many brands as possible just for fun.

A really interesting experience is to reverse the process.  The site allows you to see a tag cloud of the most common words associated with a brand and YOU guess the brand.  The site times you and lets you know if you got it right.  It is fun to test your brand knowledge and see how you do.

If you want to be more "business oriented" you can do some research on your favorite brands including your employer or your clients.  You can click on the brand and the site will provide you with a tag cloud of the words the 1.7 million people before you have associated with that brand.

Give it a try.  It is fun and you might just impress your clients with your "deep insight" to their brand.  www.brandtags.net

Are you lying to me?

By Jim Bryson on June 17, 2009 9:58 AM | No Comments

Susan Abbott points out that people who are lying often can't be caught by body language but are usually given away by their words, usually they way they tell a story. 

Drawing from Judging Honesty by Words, Not Fidgets, by Benedict Carey, Susan presents the debunks the following myths about liars.  

  • Liars do not avert their eyes more than people telling the truth
  • Liars do not fidget, sweat or slump more than truth-tellers
  • There are fleeting changes in expression, but these are difficult to analyze

In addition, she presents the following truths:

  • People who are lying tend to try to stick to a script, to avoid getting caught in a lie.
  • People telling the truth don't have a script, so they tend to recall more extraneous details, and make mistakes. And the more they talk about a given experience, the more of these details come to mind.

Paying close attention to words is just as important as nonverbal behaviour to truly understand the truth contained in the research.

Susan's blog, "Customer Experience Crossroads" can be found at www.customercrossroads.com.

Listening to Buzz: Threat or Opportunity

By Jim Bryson on May 8, 2009 12:59 PM | No Comments

How are qualitative researchers going to incorporate passive listening when we have spent our lives being trained in active listening techniques?

The proliferation of social media, blogs and other user generated content has spawned a new form of research that aggregates millions of online discussions related to a brand or concept or anything else.  Marketers can track the "buzz" surrounding a brand on Facebook, blogs, Linked-in and other sites to hear what people are saying about a product or brand when they don't think we are listening.  The comments are real and unfiltered. 

At the QRCA Symposium this week, Kristin Bush, Digital Research Senior Manager at P&G for Consumer and Market Knowledge, presented P&G's strong emphasis on "listening" to the online buzz surrounding its brands and marketing.  She even defined "listening as observing and interpreting naturally ocurring behaviors." She also promised that P&G will strive to create an ever-more systematic approach to "listening" and integrate "listening" activities into their marketing research plans. 

 

Continue reading Listening to Buzz: Threat or Opportunity.
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