A clutch of new Buzzwords

Here are some new buzz words and interesting phrases that I have collected recently that I think market researchers might be interested in.

Intrapreneurs: the entrepreneurs that instead of setting up and running their own business, work within larger businesses or organisations and drive entrepreneurial activity within these organisations. Source: Maryan Broadbent, David Smith & Adam Riley ESOMAR Asia 2012

Linguistic anthropology: Social media data mining is leading to a new bread of research focusing on understanding the detailed use of language and the processes of human communications, variation in language across time and space, the social uses of language, and the relationship between language and culture.

SoLoMo: social-local-mobile. A word made for market researchers lips that combined the hot 3 topics of social, local geographical targeting and mobile. Source: http://mashable.com/2012/01/12/solomo-hyperlocal-search/

Micro-multinationals: A new breed of entrepreneurs creating “micro-multinationals”, organizations that are global from day one. Source: Amit Gupta & Terry Sweeney ESOMAR Asia 2012

Social looping: Connecting and taking control of your disparate set of social network connections and connection channels. Source: marketing age http://sedatedworld.com/?p=947

Personal branding: The idea that people now are thinking about themselves as brands. Source: various  (Elina Halonen rightly pointed out that this is not exactly a new buzzword, but all I would say is that I have heard it being used quite a lot at the moment!)

Crowdfunding: The new trend for social crowd backed business ventures  e.g.  http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/,  http://www.crowdcube.com/

Global villager: The globe has been connected into a village by digital technology - an idea originally presented by Marshall McLuhan, popularized in his books The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) but really only realised since the advent of the web. So if you are hooking up on twitter with people in another continent you are one of the global villagers. Source: Maryan Broadbent, David Smith & Adam Riley at the ESOMAR Asia 2012

Research Improv: Using some of the theatrical techniques of improvisation in focus groups or workshops to develop and explore ideas.Source: Lee Ryan: http://appliedimprov.ning.com/profile/LeeRyan

Kinesthetic research: Kinesthetic learning is a style of teaching where pupils carry out a physical activity, rather than listening to a lecture or watching a demonstration. Kinesthetic research is where we conduct research through a physical activity or immersive activity and is tipped to be a growing area of research innovation.   Research improv is a branch of  Kinesthetic research,  clients participation in co-creation exercises with end users is another example and  so too is I suspect next example Socialized research which I spotted as a topic at the forthcoming ESOMAR congress.

Socialized Research:  This is the title of what looks like it might be a hot ticket presentation at this years ESOMAR congress by OTX Ipsos Open Thinking Exchange "a brave new world of immersion, augmented reality, geo-location, co-creation…" the addition of a little “social” into everything we do so that consumers are engaged in ways that capitalize on and mimic their expectations given the realities of today’s new world. Welcome to the new normal. Are you ready?

Decision making science: We started with psychology, this branched off into social psychology then behavioural science and got refined into behavioural economics now we have a new one decision making science. A nice all explaining concept. Source: http://www.research-live.com/features/measuring-emotion/applying-the-science-of-decision-making-to-marketing/4007689.article

Creative leaders: people in organisations to act as grit to drive innovation. Source: Maryan Broadbent, David Smith & Adam Riley at the ESOMAR Asia Conference

Social graph: the global mapping of everybody and how they're related.  Source: Brad Fitzpatrick http://bradfitz.com/social-graph-problem/

Being the wide angle lens: The person in an organisation who offers a more panoramic viewpoint on a business. Source: Maryan Broadbent, David Smith & Adam Riley at the ESOMAR Asia Conference

Chief customer: Person on persons who represent the embodiment of a customer in a business.  Source: Maryan Broadbent, David Smith & Adam Riley ESOMAR Asia 2012

Fremium: This is a is a business model by which a product or service is provided free of charge, but a premium is charged for advanced features. Source: This term has be around long enough to grab itself a wikipedia entry  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium

Showroom retailing &  Monitor Shopping:  A shift to retail spaces like electronic and book shops to become showrooms where people look at products and then order them online.  Monitor shopping is the process of going shopping online.   Source: various

Sharkonomics: Taking a shark like approach to battling with your competitor i.e. sneaking up behind them and aiming taking great big chunk out of their market share though some clever strategic move.  This seems to be the way that some of the big boys in the mobile and internet businesses seem to be operating now.  e.g. Microsoft launching a premium tablet. Source: title of book by Stefan Engeseth

Finally a couple of twitter specific buzzwords:

Trashtag: A hashtag that someone tries to establish for purely self-centred and/or commercial reasons, rather than to create a strand of content that might actually be useful or interesting to someone else.

Twitchunt: torrents of me-too sentiment on twitter gathering mass and momentum very quickly.
Obsoltweet: a tweet that has missed the boat
source: http://www.abccopywriting.com/blog/2012/05/10/12-new-twitter-buzzwords/

How to calculate the length of a survey

As an industry we tend to use survey length as the cornerstone for how we price surveys, but often the estimated lengths and real lengths of surveys can turn out to be wildly different. Leading as I have experience to potential conflict.

The reason is we have not established in the research industry a common and reliable way of estimating the length of a survey.  The most common method in circulation is to assume we answer surveys at 2.5 questions per minute but this technique is fatally flawed.  This is because question themselves can vary wildly in length e.g. a survey with 10 grid question with say 50 options may take 50 times longer to answer than a survey of 10 simple yes no questions.

So I have been on a bit of quest to work out some slightly more accurate ways of do this. As a result of some recent work we have been doing to examine in detail how long respondents answer survey I have come up with 3 new alternative methods I would like to put forward to more accurately calculate the length of a survey. 

I hope they may be of use to some of you.

Method 1: Survey length = (W/5 + Q*5 + (D-Q)*2 + T*15)/60

This is the most accurate way of doing it (though I recognise it take a quite a bit of work). This formula will given you the length of an English language survey in minutes.

W = word count: Do a word count of the total length of questionnaire (questions, instructions and options). An easy way to do this is to cut and paste the survey into word but don't forget to remove any coding instructions first and it will tell you the word count. Respondents read English in western markets at an average rate of 5 words per second.

Q = Number of Questions: Count how many questions the average respondent has to answer. Allow 4 seconds per question general thinking time and 1 second navigation time* (assuming 1 question per page).
*this may vary depending on survey platform if it takes longer than 1 second to load each page adjust accordingly

D = Total number of decisions respondents have to make: Count in total how many decisions the average respondent makes in total using this guide below and allow then 2 seconds per decision.

Single choice question = 1 decision
Multi-choice question = 0.5 of a decision per option
Grids = 1 decision per row

T = Open ended text questions: Count how many open ended text feedback questions a respondents has to answer and allow 15 seconds per question. (note this may vary quite dramatically based on the content of the question but on average people dedicate 15 seconds to answering and open ended question).

Method 2: Survey length = (W/5 + R*1.8)/60

If you want slightly simpler approach use this formula which is not quite so reliable but will get you close...

W= word count
R = total number of row options: Note this is just rows and not columns on a grid. This can be quite easily done by cutting and pasting your survey into excel and then in a side column mark up all the rows and then sort.

Method 3: W/150

If you don't have enough time to add up all the number of questions and row options this is another quick a dirty method (though I would not vouch for it being much more acurate than the 2.5 questions per minute approach).

This will give you a rough estimate of the length of a survey in minutes.  It is no where near as acurate as the above 2 more detailed methods but it will be someone in the correct ball park. Careful though if  you spot your a dealing with a particularly verbose questionnaire.

A wisdom of the crowd approach I would recommend would be to use both the 2.5 question and W/150 methods and compare the differences - if they produce just about similar figures well go with that, if they generate big differences it might be worth adopting method 1 to do it properly.

Where all these formula will fall over?

1. If all the respondents don't see all the questions: Skip logic can mean not everyone sees every question in a survey which means it can be hard to work out the average number of question respondents will have to answer which you will need to know to accurately work out the average survey completion time. Most errors in estimating survey length centre around this issue. There is often no easy way of doing this other than manually working it out using a spreadsheet.

2. Not properly taking into account question loops. This another issue that leads to people miscalculating the length of a survey. If for example there is a loop of question that you ask for a set of brands people often forget to include the extra time it take to answer these question and only count one loop.

3. If you are working out the length of a survey not conducted in English: or where English is not the primary language (India for example) you will need to weight for longer reading, comprehension, consideration and survey loading times in different countries. Below is a rough weighting guide if you are working from a translated version of an English survey, (sorry that I don't have time weighting data from every country):

	Length   Weighting
Japanese/Korean	0.95
Netherlands	1.00
Germany	1.05
French	1.06
Spain	1.09
Scandinavia	1.10
Italy	1.11
Chinese	1.13
India	1.34
Eastern Europe	1.35
Russia	1.37
Latin America	1.43

4. If there are a lot of images in the survey:  you will need to allow for extra loading times. Allow between 2-10 seconds per mb.

5. If you are including a lot of  non-standard question formats in the survey e.g. sorting and drop down style question take longer to answer.

6. If you are boring people to death with a long highly repetitive survey!  Respondents will start speeding when they get bored and so average decision making time can drop.

Do you have any thoughts?

Now I would love to hear from anyone who has some thoughts on this or have come up with what they think is a more effective means of doing this. My ultimate aim is to find an agreed means for the who industry to adopt to use as a more effective trading currency when pricing surveys.