Research Roundup: Bieber Killed the Radio Star
Posted by Vovici Blog on Sat, Jan 08, 2011
I confess that before reading the top 5 most retweeted links on the #MRX community this past week I thought that Justin Bieber was just a kid pop star who had stolen his haircut from Tom Brady. In fact, he’s the first mainstream music artist discovered through YouTube, has inspired many Internet memes from fans and critics alike, and—this week in particular—has become influential as an icon in the debate about influence.
The top 5 retweeted stories:
Your Followers Are No Measure of Your Influence (first tagged by @rreitsma) – In AdAge, Matthew Creamer notes that Justin Bieber has “a prodigious understanding of how to use social-media tools that helped him rise out of Canadian obscurity before he had to shave.” That doesn’t mean Bieber deserves to be rated the most influential person on Twitter by Klout (with a perfect Klout score of 100), Creamer argues; in fact, he’s not sure that follower count is the surest predictor of influence.
No One Man Should Have All That Klout – When Tom Ewing isn’t working with social media and market research for his day job with Kantar Operations, he’s reviewing every UK #1 single. He gets to combine his passion for music and MR in response to Creamer, defending why Justin Bieber may be the most influential user on Twitter—at least, under certain definitions of influence.
Why it pays to get social in research communities (tagged by @kristinluck) – This Research article by Stephan Ludwig and Paul Nola demonstrates the effect of community participation on response rates. Those who participated in a community that allowed members to start their own discussion threads posted 58% more messages more than those members of a community that didn’t support member-initiated threads and had a higher response rate to surveys than did the control group (which didn’t belong to a community). The group that participated in the community where they couldn’t start their own discussions had the lowest response rate. Clearly, communities that empower members to communicate with one another generate the richest data set.
On infographics – Noah Brier rightly rants that infographics are mind-numbing aesthetic exercises that entertain but don’t educate. “What is it about information presented in this way makes people want to share it even though very few of those tweeting the link could recite back any specific data point?”
Russian research market grew 15% in 2010, says OIROM (tagged by @researchlive) – Russia, which still hasn’t hosted a Justin Bieber concert, saw its market-research industry grow 15% to $320 million last year.
Still not reading Twitter? Come on in – it’s bieberlicious.