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Archive for the ‘LinkedIn’ CategoryFive years on…Thursday, December 9th, 2010
This week Chrissie Douglas reflects on the change of pace in both her own life and in the broader business world over the last 5 years. Doesn’t time fly. Thursday’s here again and this week it’s my turn to put pen to paper. This is when I have to admit, I begin to panic. I panic because my life has been hijacked by my 2 young children for almost 5 years now. During this time I haven’t really had to think about the outside world, never mind write anything. Life for me is about minute to minute, hour to hour, day to day ‘fire-fighting’ – school runs, nappy changes, are they fed and watered? So I palm the kids off with their Dad for a couple of hours and for the first time in years I sit, ponder and reflect. The thing that immediately comes to mind is how much things have changed in the last 5 years and the pace of that change – where did those years go? Five years ago the world was a very different place. With the risk of being random – Britain was booming yet now we are in the midst of the greatest recession since the 1930s. Twitter was known as “text messaging” and the “tweet” only went to one other person – now you share your thoughts and movements with the world. Friends were called ‘friends’ and you used to go and meet them in the pub at the weekend. Now friends are your ‘social network’ and the pub has closed down! We now ‘talk’ to friends & acquaintances via the rapidly growing social networking sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. We used to go to the store to shop – now the store comes to the door. And in keeping with this randomness – there were 9 planets in our solar system and now there are only 8 (Pluto was demoted in 2006)! So a lot has changed. The world has moved on in such a short time and I have struggled to move with it. I still use my phone as a phone whereas all my friends are talking about the latest apps. This preoccupation with our own world, the day to day and short term-ism is often mirrored in the business world. Just like me, some businesses are so entrenched in the detail, the tactical, the ‘here and now’, that they fall into the trap of loosing focus, lacking direction and forgetting about the big picture. Many businesses drift along unaware of the changes going on around them and even when they do, fail to react quick enough. There are some high profile examples in this 5 year timeframe. For example in the retail sector in the last 2 years alone we have lost; Thirst Quench, Stylo, Mosaic, Principles, Sofa Workshop, Allied Carpets, Viyella, Dewhursts, Woolworths, MFI, Zavvi/Virgin Megastore, and Barratts. The list goes on… The specific details are varied, but the commonality is that they failed to spot and/or react to change quickly enough. For example Woolworths, failed to move with the times and compete effectively with the ‘pile it high’, ‘sell it cheap’ supermarket discounters. In other words – as the competition changed their trading models – Woolies didn’t react. Another example is Sofa Workshop who struggled as consumers put off buying so-called ‘big ticket’ items due to the slowdown in the housing market, fears over the wider economy and the lack of available credit. There are other companies that are clinging onto their existence. For example, Blockbuster was late in realising that brick based stores no longer work in a world of on-demand TV and is desperately trying to change their business model to one based on low-cost DVD rental kiosks and offering mobile movies via smartphone. Likewise, Borders, the global book store is currently developing a Kobo e-reader to try and compete with e-book readers from Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble. Will they make it or are they too late? So how do we keep informed of what’s going on around us? How do we pre-empt change and respond proactively? How do we stay ahead? The answer lies in research. Market research obtains information direct from the people who matter – business people, industry experts and customers. Market tracking research provides low cost, up-to-the-minute, detailed market intelligence. Market tracking monitors allow important trends to be captured rapidly, enabling quick, reliable decisions to be made on market size, growth, value and development. Tracking research is also fundamental to monitoring brand performance and measuring customer satisfaction. Market tracking allows companies to monitor how effective they are in relation to their competitors, and to react quickly to changing market conditions. Understanding Value Is KeyFriday, March 6th, 2009
In this week’s Thursday Night Insight, Nick Hague assesses how valuable social networking really is today. In the last week I have been bitten by a vampire, had a sheep thrown at me and been poked by numerous people I don’t even know! No, I am not talking about the strange life of a researcher; I am talking about the wonderful life of social networking on Facebook. Under the duress of other friends linking up with old school acquaintances and not wanting to miss out on this new phenomenon I joined Facebook two years ago. Since the very early frenetic activity of trying to get as many friends as possible, my account has laid dormant for a good 18 months after my circle of friends reached saturation point (note the term friends I use loosely as I have over 100 friends but the majority are more distant connections that I have never really known). Facebook and social networking have grown dramatically over the past few years from Friends Reunited through to Myspace, Bebo and now Twitter. However, my question for this week’s Thursday Night Insight is how valuable is social networking and with the number of people who visit Facebook leveling off over the past few months in the USA, are we facing Facebook fatigue? When something is growing, everyone feels like they are part of something valuable but what about when the growth stops? Are people losing sight of the importance of what value social networking delivers as opposed to focusing more on the dramatic growth it has experienced and valuing it at astronomical amounts (On October 24, 2007 Microsoft announced that it had purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million, giving Facebook a total implied value of around $15 billion). I believe that, similar to what happened in the 1990s with the dot com bubble bursting, the market valuation of some social networking sites has been blinded by myopia of the thought that growth is directly related to value when actually the whole concept is "built on sand" and without any real substance the market value is actually a lot less. If Facebook doesn’t figure out what the real value is that it creates and figures out a way to capture it, they may be at great risk of collapse over the next few years. Maybe they can take a leaf out of Linkedin’s book? I have been a member of Linkedin for over a year and although I haven’t used it that much I can definitely see longevity in the notion of business networking as opposed to social networking. One recent development of Linkedin is the creation of a research network that enables over 28 million b2b professionals (15 million within the US and 13 million across the world) to be targeted worldwide. Once the luxury of consumer marketers, now b2b research can be utilized effectively online across difficult to reach industries, geographies and job functions. Another advantage of Linkedin we have found at B2B International is that people have a vested interested in keeping their details up to date. This allows us as researchers to actively source named contacts that were previously inaccessible before from within large corporations because we couldn’t get past the receptionist who polices the front desk with a no name policy. It is clear that "panels" of one kind or another are the future of research and online networking will help deliver that benefit to research companies. However, will Twitter, Facebook and other such sites continue to evolve? If not, they could well go the way of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzie Scheme over the next few years. For more information on how B2B International can help you with e-surveys and your e-research click here or phone one of our UK, US or Chinese offices and speak to our team. Online Business NetworkingFriday, August 29th, 2008
In his most recent Thursday Night Insight post, Matthew Harrison ponders how advancements in technology have impacted on – and continue to affect – the way we live our lives and conduct our business. My colleagues may laugh, but I’ve always considered myself relatively in-touch with the latest technological developments. I’ve never been the sort of person to buy Stuff Magazine, prance around the living room with a Nintendo Wii or stay up all night in my anorak cyber-scuffling with a student from Malaysia, but nor am I a technophobe. In fact I like to think that I use technology as and when it enhances my life, but within the realms of social acceptability. Indeed, deep within the bowels of the B2B International website, you may find that I ‘pioneered’ our online focus groups. I was also the first person in our organization to own a Blackberry, much to the derision of my colleagues, many of whom are now putting their marriages at risk by becoming full-time Crackberry addicts themselves. I must admit to a complete inability to attach a projector to a lap-top and make it work first-time, but from what I’ve observed this is true of most market researchers. A technology we all now regard as a basic tool of the workplace and our social lives is, of course, email. How would we market researchers cope if we still had to print and bind reports, and courier them through to our clients? How would we or our clients feel if every update had to be by phone or face-to-face, with fieldwork updates out-of-date as soon as they were produced and questionnaires faxed back and forth until they were finalized? There is no doubt that email has improved not only the speed and ease of communication, but also – as a general rule – the quality of communication. As with my professional life, my social life and personal interactions used to rely heavily on email communications. Weekends away, news on the latest engagements and pregnancies, photographs of friends on exotic holidays – every communication of any substance was performed through email, with short-term arrangements and snippets of information communicated through cell-phone. But some time around last Spring, something strange started to happen. I was living in China at the time, and I noticed the steady stream of social emails start to diminish. This left me perplexed and a little worried. Had someone decided to firewall the endless news of weddings, births and christenings on the grounds that it was too tedious for human consumption? Had I offended somebody? Had everyone forgotten about me? As the weeks passed and the stream of emails became a trickle, I genuinely started to fear that the word had got out – that it was Matthew Harrison who spoiled that wedding in 2003 by insisting the DJ play The Locomotion. But one night, as I lay awake plagued with self-doubt, it struck me. Was it a mistake to ignore all of the invitations? Was I wrong to dismiss this phenomenon as a silly fad indulged in by teenagers in low-slung trousers and nosey twentysomethings who should know better? “THAT’S IT!” I yelled, leaping out of my depressed slumber and cart-wheeling across the bedroom. “IT’S FACEBOOK!! I knew I wasn’t a social pariah! I knew Dave and Liz wouldn’t forget to send me the pictures from their long weekend in Budapest! Where’s my laptop?” That very night I joined the masses and became a Facebook User. Fourteen months later, I have a grand total of 57 friends, ranging from my nearest and dearest through to childhood friends that I haven’t laid eyes on for two decades. There is something about the public dissemination of ‘personal’ information that I feel uncomfortable with, and something not quite right about a 31-year old having what is effectively a homepage. But the truth is that this is how my peer-group (even my parents) – my ‘audience’ – is now communicating, and that, therefore, is how I have to communicate. To reject this means of communication would be social suicide. In the market research industry and more generally across business markets, the latest consumer technologies tend to be watched with a mixture of interest and wariness, before they become adapted for business use and then accepted by the wider business community. Just as B2B International looked at online discussion forums being used mainly by teenagers and turned them into a market research technique, so Facebook and similar social networking tools are now evolving into business applications. I now work at B2B International in the USA and yesterday subscribed to LinkedIn, the business networking tool allowing businesspeople to make contact, recommend and communicate with each other. Four clients within a month had asked me for my LinkedIn details, and I wasn’t going to risk my communication from clients and potential clients drying up. How far this type of application will replace existing means of communication for businesses, or even evolve into a technique that can be used for market research purposes, is unclear. However, doing business depends on communicating with those whose needs we can profitably fulfil, and those who shut out messages that are being transmitted through new and innovative means risk more than a few sleepless nights. Matthew Harrison is a Director of B2B International, based in New York. He can be contacted at matthewh@b2binternational.com, on +1 914-761-1909, or on LinkedIn. |
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