The Research Playbook

Archive for June, 2011

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Recently we published a post on Tier-Two sites. Tier-Two Social Networking and Utility Sites

This post is a follow up to it and will be followed by more as the weeks roll on.

One of the newer sites to come onto the social media scene is Visible.me [don’t add dot_com]. This is a networking site that let’s you track activities across platforms. Visible.me. like other sites allows you to import profile data from other sources into your Visible.me profile.

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The questionnaire Audit, Correct, and Enhance (ACE) approach starts with the audit. The Questionnaire Quality Control (QQC) audit identifies problems and errors commonly encountered during the task of questionnaire design.

My Questionnaire seems perfectly fine to me

No one wants to hear that what she or he created is less than masterful, but there is more to Questionnaire Design than asking questions the way you do in everyday discourse. Our audit is structured to be helpful and provide actionable guidance to the author(s) of the research instrument.

We have created a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) version of this audit process and we invite you to use this process to improve your questionnaires before submitting them for fielding. The process is described in this post and we hope you find it valuable. Read the rest of this entry »

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If you are reading this blog chances are good you have created a presence on one or more of the major social network sites (e.g., Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, or Facebook). However, there are numerous (and a growing number) of what I’ll call Tier–Two sites that may be just as important to meeting your objectives as these well known Tier-One sites are.

See this post for more information Powering-up-your-social-media-presence
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The Sales Cycle
All businesses secure customers through a sales cycle. The starting point is the Potential Market or said another way the Available Audience for your product and/or service. There is a portion of this market (you hope a large one) that is Aware of your business (i.e., your products and services), once they become Aware, you have the chance to be Considered.

You will perhaps start out on a long-list of sellers and hope to be placed on the person or company’s short-list where the chances of being selected increase. Eventually you want to move to a Preferred status, which you hope to maintain through customer-care. Finally, a Purchase is made; you have successfully navigated the prospect into your customer base. Read the rest of this entry »

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Situation
Recently, I volunteered to tutor grammar school children in math through a program our city offers. It has been a wonderful experience and a privilege to work with the young students in our schools.

A little while ago I was talking about my tutoring experience with a couple of marketing colleagues and I said “You know I probably learn more from my students than I teach them and some of what I’m learning is applicable to marketing.” One colleague asked “Like what?”
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Situation
Recently a unique business specializing in helping companies develop communities and networks asked if we could help them improve the value and performance of a Twitter account they started more than 2 years ago. While they wanted help, the business owner was skeptical about Twitter. True they had a sizable number of followers [approx 4,000], but they attributed that to the success of their blog, which was syndicated and had over 30,000 readers.

We discussed options and suggested starting slow to give the owner time to become comfortable with our approach. It was clear that the Twitter account had benefited from the blog. However, the more typical path is for a blog to benefit from a Twitter account, that is, followers are introduced to the blog, rather than the other way around. With that in mind, we began our campaign to grow the number of targeted Twitter followers. We went about the work of providing useful and interesting tweets, some of which pointed followers to the blog where a much richer library of information was available.
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