MRS Online Research Conference: Some Thoughts

A few quick notes on the MRS Online Research Conference, which I was at today (though I missed Mark Earls’ keynote, and sadly had to leave before the MESH/Oxfam presentation).

What really struck me about the 5th Annual MRS Online Research conference is that it represents – for me at least – a kind of tipping point in the “Research 2.0” saga. It’s the first online conference I’ve been to where the client work and case studies were more exciting and compelling than the new ideas.

The form book for online conferences over the last few years has been as follows: we talk a brilliant game – about collaboration, surrendering control, engaging participants, building communities – and then the actual examples have often been thin, or guarded, or rather more traditional than might have been expected.

But all of today’s highlights, for me, involved real client work – whether there was a researcher at the end of it or not. BT’s Dr Nicola Millard talked about networking the company to provide better customer experiences. Rachel Cassidy from A & N Media not only mentioned the ROI of her insight panel without fudging the definition, she happily provided numbers. United Biscuits’ Jo Carter and Sony’s Mark Uttley presented case studies of participant engagement, blurring the lines between qualitative and quantitative with some very slick and impressive work.

The overall impression for someone like me – too often a thinker not a doer – was exciting: this stuff actually works!

Of course there were ideas flying around too, and many of them should give pause for thought. Issues of privacy and consent, and of the blurring lines between research and marketing, won’t get any less important.

And the idea that self-reported data is fundamentally and deeply flawed might have been a heresy once, but it’s rapidly becoming mainstream. The friendly division now seems to be around what to do about that: give individuals more autonomy, richness and freedom in what they tell us and when – or move away from the idea of the individual respondent entirely, and look to group and behavioural data for insight?