The researcher’s ability to do a good job for you is based largely on how well you articulate your goals and expectations. Before you call a researcher in, you need to be able to answer several questions. A good researcher can help you answer them if you’re having a hard time.

1. What do you want to learn? (Or what is you don’t know?)
2. What do you want to be able to do with what you learn?
3. What decisions do you want to be able to make?
4. What information do you need to be able to make those decisions?
5. Who is your target audience?

After you’ve answered these questions:

• Look for a researcher who understands your situation.
• Be open and honest with the researcher.
• Don’t give the researcher questions or prescribe the methodology. Instead, tell the researcher what you want to learn.

Photo credit: Mr. Mark

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Related posts:

1. Getting the Most From Your Marketing Research
2. Roots of Modern Marketing Research
3. Getting Started with Marketing Research

There are times when email newsletters are perfect, just know not in all situations is that the case. At times, RSS-to-email messaging from a category on your blog should be the delivery of choice. But that conversation is for another time.

Here are a few quick tips for creating powerful, attractive electronic newsletters.

1. Have an agenda. What is the purpose of your newsletter? Are you a thought leader? Is your message for customer retention purposes?
2. Provide usable, original content. Make sure your message is relevant to your audience.
3. Grab attention with your subject lines. I talk about this in depth here.
4. Remember short attentions spans. Design your newsletter for skimmers. Use catchy sub titles for eye-catching sections.
5. Publish on a schedule. Whatever schedule you create, stick to it so your readers know when to expect your juicy tidbits of info.

Have fun and happy publishing!

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To be an effective and efficient consumer of marketing research, it is important to understand the following:

• The concept of sampling*.
• If you are doing research that involves live interviewers, find the very best interviewers you can. This is not the place to save money.
• Good research is intellectually honest. If executed properly, it provides an honest reflection of reality, not what you want reality to be.
• You marketing research to learn about people, not to convince them. Research is not the place to sell.
• Your researcher is the consumer’s representative in your working process. Don’t shoot the messenger.
• The consumer doesn’t care what your problems are. Research is not the place to be defensive if consumers see things differently than you do.
• Take what consumers say to heart, but don’t take it personally.
• Not all of your customers or prospects are likeable people.
• The marketplace is full of ambiguity, mitigating circumstances and competition. This is the world your customers live in.

* The concept of sampling is theoretically simple, but frequently misinterpreted in practice. The idea is that a properly developed sample—that is, the group of people you choose to interview or otherwise include in your study—can serve as an accurate representation of the larger universe from which it is drawn. To know what a pot of soup tastes like, for example, you don’t have to eat all of it. If you stir the pot and draw a ladle of it out, you can know what the soup tastes like. That’s how sampling works. Your mix up your universe of target audience members and draw from that universe a representative sample. The key to making it all work is that you have to include as many people as you can from the sample in your study or else your “ladle” will not be representatives.

Photo credit: fensterbme

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2. Roots of Modern Marketing Research
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Actually, he’s trying to make a point that when you’re asked for your opinion about something, give it.

Don’t pass the buck or worry about it being right or wrong. It’s your opinion so express yourself.

Photo credit: DaveHuth

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From the Google Buzz website -

Go beyond status messages. Share updates, photos, videos, and more. Start conversations about the things you find interesting.

No setup needed
Automatically follow the people you email and chat with the most in Gmail.

Share publicly or privately
Publish your ideas to the world or just to your closest friends.

Inbox integration
Comments get sent right to your inbox so it’s easy to keep the conversation going.

Photo friendly
See thumbnails with each post, and browse full-screen photos from popular sites.

Connect sites you already use
Import your stuff from Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, and Google Reader.

See updates in real time
New posts and comments pop in as they happen. No refresh required.

Just the good stuff
Buzz recommends interesting posts and weeds out ones you’re likely to skip.

Buzz from your phone
See buzz around you and tag posts with your location. Point your phone’s browser to: buzz.google.com.

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Marketing research is a marriage of science and art. Its roots are planted in the social sciences, where sociologists, anthropologists, demographers and psychologists developed formal and objective procedures for studying people. These days research is evolving in step with advances in the understanding of neuroscience, physiology and the psychology of emotions.

In many ways, commercial marketing research is still a young discipline. The lessons learned from social scientists transitioned into the commercial marketplace in the 1940s and 1950s when the big American advertising agencies realized they needed a better understanding of consumers and consumer behavior. They created research departments, staffed them with social scientists and used research to direct their advertising campaigns. Their clients, impressed by the success that came from the application of sound marketing research, spread the word around the world.

As commercial marketing research matured as a service category, questions arose about the objectivity and possible conflicts of interests involving in-house research departments. As a result, most of the big ad agencies began to spin off their research operations into independent, freestanding businesses.

Today, research firms come from all shapes and sizes. Some aspire to retain a foot in the academic world. Others are distinctly commercial.

For all of the advances in modern marketing research, though, it’s important to remember that good research is almost always a mix of science and art. As much as we may try at times, the behavior and decision making processes of human beings are far too complex and nuanced to reduce to simple stereotypes and generalizations. The art of marketing research is a function of the experience and the interpersonal, listening, comprehension and analytical skills of the researcher.

Photo credit: Billy Currie

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How many passwords do you have?
Does someone have your password?
How do you protect yourself from this?

Passwords are a big deal!!!  They control access to everything in our lives.  This means we should be as secure about our passwords as possible.  Most people have a tendency to have a low, medium, and high security password.  This is a great theory, but a very misguided thought process.  Computers have a lot of horsepower now and the time to break a password is trivial.  Add to this that Google will tend to have a LOT of information about you, makes passwords easy to guess.

Example: a child’s name password
Low - ben
Med - Ben72
High - @Ben1972!

All of these passwords are valid.  The question is, where did you use these passwords?  If you use them on a network that is not secure, or a service such as POP email, then you may not be the only person that has these passwords.

Human nature is to keep passwords simple. But in a world of computers, simple passwords don’t help.  The other trait of people is to have a password we can remember. If it is too hard to remember we simply write it down and leave it on our desk.  Well people will look at your desk and see your password taped to the monitor and now have access to your data.

There are several ways to fix this:

1. Never reuse your passwords (there are programs that will make every combination of passwords available from your lowest level password).
2. Keep passwords in a secure location.
3. A recommended method of the above solutions is to use something like lastpass.com’s password manager from http://lastpass.com. The free or premium both work well.  Another great product is Keepass from http://keepass.com.

The advantage of these products is that they will give you a random password and the ability to both store it as well as simplify the logon process by putting in your logon and password and you only need to remember 1 password.  Which you wont’ give out!!!

Happy and Safe Surfing!!!!

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Truth is, the title is about ‘titles that catch your attention’. Specifically, blog article titles that catch your attention. In the wonderful world of inbound marketing, strategically crafted titles are invaluable for SEO (search engine optimization), which leads to great organic search results, which leads to website / blog traffic, which leads to (we hope) lead generation from your efforts.

While scanning the RSS feeds in my Google Reader, I ran across an article that Chris wrote titled, “How Do You Stack Up“. He wrote about just this topic. He wondered how his blog article titles stacked up against the world for attraction by scanning eyeballs. Chris’ list of most recent titles are below -

• The Location Game – Over on OPENForum
• Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX3 Review
• How Social Media Can Power Your Business – Kitchen Table Talks
• Points of Contact
• The Social Media Pie – over on OPEN Forum
• How I Use Mindmapping to Write
• Cubicle Farming
• New Job New You – a Book Review
• The Writing Practice
• Switch- A Book Review
• The Beginning – Kitchen Table Talks
• How NOT to Help Haiti
• How Systems Thwart Service
• Your Farmer List
• Living In Google Wave
• What is Your Pop-Up Store
• Get Seen- Do It Now
• Represented by the APB Speaker’s Bureau
• More Fun Than Competition
• Business Stripped Bare – Book Review
• Do One Thing Very Well
• How Heartfelt Marketing Delivers
• The Future Is Evidently Blurry
• A Customer Aware World
• Experiment- 30 Days of Bing
• Deepen Your Networks
• New Sponsor – Search Engine Strategies NYC
• Are You Ready for Fun

What do you think? Did his blog article titles catch your eye?

Well, now I need to go look at my last few blog article titles. I wonder how mine stack up?

• February Schedule for Coffee with the CEO #cwtc
• Weather in Hampton Roads is so jacked!
• Our kids are connected - Are you?
• God will give Wisdom, just ask
• February IMG Session : Blogging for Business : You’re invited!
• I’ll help, we’ll do it together.
• Blogging gives you a Rockstar Voice. Use it!
• Top 10 Posts of 2009
• Social Media for Business comes to Norfolk
• Local #hrva Live Jams at Starbucks
• Agency’s Pitch requires the Right Brain and Left Brain
• Testing of Your Faith Develops Perseverance
• This is what I’m doing to you -
• NPR says the Phonebook’s Days are Numbered. Do you?
• What the heck is Inbound Marketing?
• Late Night Chillin
• Join Me at @gbvabeach at Town Center
• Can you remember Doody Calls?
• Prank Phone Call - Dublin School Demolition - Hilarious video!
• Why blogging will (still) change the world
• Twitter Updates for 2010-01-14

Hmm, I think I need work. Some are ideal for SEO. Some are ideal for eye-catching. But I need to get better. What about you? Do you stack up? Could you do better with your blog article titles?

Photo credit: Sister72

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I don’t remember jokes easily. But one I recall from my childhood was about a hotel company executive who’d been invited to speak on national television. (In those days, when you were lucky to get three channels of television, being on “national television” was about as big as you could get.)

People wondered what the hotel exec would say. Would he talk about trends in travel, the dynamics of hotel finance or the importance of quality control?

This is what he said:

When you stay at our hotels, please keep the shower curtain inside the tub.

I was reminded of that line when I was recently asked to speak to a group of marketing people about getting the most from their marketing research. I could have talked about “A Control Function Approach to Endogeniety in Consumer Choice Models,” a topic big among researchers at the moment. Instead, like the hotel executive, I wanted to talk about the basics because it’s confusion about the basics that keeps a lot of people from getting the most out of their marketing research.

Photo credit: ChernobylBob

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Why does this happen? Because I listen. I want to listen. I want to be a sponge when I’m around smart people - you!

I think we must think that way to progress positively in our lives. I know we must think that way to progress in our business lives.

I tell you all this to get you to speak up. Blog about your thoughts. Blog about your business. Blog about mindmapping or brainstorming.

Technology has created this massive platform for you to be a rockstar. Use it. Let others see how freakin’ smart and innovative you are. Let me see how freakin’ smart and innovative you are. I want to read what you have to say.

photo credit: flickr.com/photos/phoebelina

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A national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that … today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.

How does this compare to your digital life? The technology is here today to retrieve, and have pushed to you, any type or massive amount of information you could imagine. Whether you want to or not, the means to make you more efficient is here in our laptops, smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers. Are you taking full advantage of the digital revolution?

Photo credit: waxmerchant

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As I quite often do, I exited the meeting wanting to call every person on our team and begin brainstorming ideas instantly. As I ran through this list of people in my head I noticed the types of folks I wanted to talk to - creatives, operational, techies, thinkers, and the list goes on.

Now to make my point - I promise there is one.

In order to keep your agency in the running during the bidding process of a project, both right-brain folks and left-brain folks are equally important and must work together. One side out maneuvering the other would be catastrophic. What do I mean?

Left Brain

Your initial contact (in our case, the written Answer to the RFP) with the potential client is all about convincing them that you belong on their pitch process. They need to see:

• Your team’s professionalism and confidence in your work.
• How your team thinks logically, strategically and on-task.
• The quality of your team’s credentials.
• Examples of successful campaigns.
• The creativity your team can demonstrate.

Right Brain

Once your pitch has made it through the cut process, you must then address the more emotional senses and concerns that will differentiate you from the next agency. They need to see:

• The passion your team has for their project.
• The overwhelming innovation your team’s brainstorming processes have produced.
• Your team’s creative concepts have aligned with their strategic goals.
• The working chemistry your team can share with the client.

We hope to have a very successful bid process on this particular RFP. And hopefully these points can help you. Good luck in your agency’s next pitch.

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Of the many topics to be covered, will be -

• Why you should blog.
• How and where to setup a new blog.
• How often to blog.
• When to blog - on a schedule?
• Who to blog to.
• Inbound marketing concepts.
• Lead generation.
• How to blog efficiently.
• How to tie your blog to other social media networks such as Twitter and Facebook.
• How to measure the results of blogging.
• How to encourage audience interaction on your blog.
• How to syndicate your blog.
• Is blogging all you need to do?

Go here for more information and registration details on this event.

If you would like to have Keith speak for your organization, please contact him here.

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