Market Researchers on Twitter: The #MRX Community 10 Days In
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Thu, Aug 05, 2010
In one of the first #MRXchats, Tom H. C. Anderson asked researchers why they were on Twitter. Among the responses:
- “On Twitter because tweets I read often lead to interesting questions, resources or research results.” - @annmariastat
- “Funnily enough, initially it was to connect with people from *other* disciplines/industries - and for some fun/time out.” - @zebrabites
- “I've been on Twitter since '07 ...is personally for ambient socialization and triangulation of facts.” - @theelusivefish
Twitter can be a great resource for connecting to other research professionals and keeping up with interesting news stories and blog posts. As Reineke Reitsma of Forrester has written:
The time I spend on Twitter definitely balances out the knowledge I gain. Twitter makes it easy for me to stay up to date on trends in different regions, on a wide range of organizations and topics. It helps me to get multiple opinions on a topic and gain a lot of new insights. Twitter feeds are also a great way to learn something new, both on a professional level (I found for example the blog futureofinsight.com or the interactive graphic website flowingdata.com through feeds), but also more personal facts like that there are heavy thunder storms in San Francisco, while it's excellent weather to play cricket in Australia.
Reineke limits herself to checking Twitter only two or three times a day, because Twitter can also be a time sink and distraction. The #MR hashtag community on Twitter had become so filled with spam that 10 days ago I jokingly declared independence from #MR to start a new #MRX community. Many people made the switch: over the past week, there are 176 contributors chiming in with 71 tweets a day (according to What the hashtag?). At one point #MRX had a TweetReach of 37,031 people compared to 8,184 for #MR! The spammers and "#Mr." tweeters can have #MR.
Some worry the spammers will take over #MRX as well. I hope the focus group spammers who frequent #MR realize that they don’t want to recruit market researchers themselves, which makes #MRX a bad community for them. And the only significant “drive-by” tweeting has been for Morristown TN weather, as a Twitter bot tags its posts with #MRX. As Ray Poynter observed to Tom De Ruyck, “That's the beauty & the beast of Twitter, we can't MAKE any hashtag uniquely ours #mrx, all part of ceding power, horrible :)”.
For me, following hashtags rather than lists provides a “Reader’s Digest” take on Twitter -- I do like to read Twitter lists when I have time. They have the advantage of giving you the view of the whole person: Tom Ewing's music tweets, Joel Rubinson's Yankee tweets, Annie Pettit’s obsession with sweets. Unfortunately, lists take more time to read, and sometimes I need to cut to the chase.
Which is where a quality hashtag like #MRX comes in. Thanks to everyone who supported #MRX in its early days, with special thanks to Ray. As an interesting side note, lots of tools claim to measure Twitter influence but most do a poor job. For instance, Twitalyzer rates Ray Poynter’s influence on Twitter at 0.9%. Ray’s trumpeting of the move to #MRX was widely retweeted and convinced many to make the switch. Clearly, calculating actual influence such as Ray has in the real world is hard to reduce to an algorithm.
Last Friday, @dub_research said, “Week one of our brilliantly fantastic 'salad days' research community over, it's been a blast so far, beyond our expectations!” That is has. If you haven’t joined Twitter, read the #MRX tweets and then sign in and contribute!