Unpopular Posts from "Voice of Vovici"

Email Article |  digg it |  reddit |  delicious |  StumbleUpon |  Facebook |  Twitter |  LinkedIn 

So in the recent redesign of this blog we added a Posts by Popularity sidebar. I’m glad for the addition, as that it always one of my favorite pages on news sites. That said, it reminds me of grade school.

I was the youngest in class, small for my age, and was always picked last in gym class by the Bombardment captains. I recall the one time I got to be captain, and I picked all the unathletic kids first. Yeah, we lost. The game was still fun.

In that spirit, here are the unpopular posts of this blog.

• Rethinking the Role of the MR Dept. – In these times of change, MR departments need to mentor and assist fellow employees who are doing their own surveys using survey software. This can be a jarring change from how such departments operate today.
• Market Research Blogs – Yes, I realize blogs are passé now and Twitter is where the action is: this article lists the blogs and Twitter accounts of a number of MR professionals that I read.
• MROC – Market-research online communities are popular, even if calling them MROCs isn’t. This is an abstract of Brad Bortner’s white paper on “Web 2.0 and MR” and includes my suggestion of one way to position MROCs.
• Unsubscribe Survey Questions – Letting subscribers unsubscribe from email is necessary but unpopular. Since you have to do it, modify one of these templates to make sure that you are soliciting feedback to understand why people are unsubscribing.
• Recommended Survey Length – I know, short surveys are all the rage today. But sometimes a long survey is appropriate for the research task at hand, especially for surveys of major accounts.
• Face-to-Face Interviews – Yes, they’re unpopular because they’re expensive, but face-to-face interviews provide great insight and great experiences. If all you’ve ever done is write questionnaires to administer online, you’re missing the understanding of survey research that comes from seeing the respondent react to the questions you wrote, the wording you used and the order you put the questions in.

Let the bombardment of comments begin.