blog.msurveys.com

It's been a while since I posted here, due to some busy times at work... and at least partly due to having a paper accepted for the MRS Research 2008 conference. The paper, co-written with Diana Derval of Derval Research, was part of a fun session on Web 2.0 and communities, which was generally well received (as far as I'm aware at least..). 

Bebo have gone live with their apps developer program. It's essentially a clone of the Facebook API, so porting existing facebook applications is very easy. Below a screenshot from a prototype app integrating GMI's NetPanel2 panel management software into Bebo - a clone of the NetPanel facebook prototype I first described last year in this post.

I imagine this could be of particular interest to brands or agencies wanting to connect with teenagers in the UK, given Bebo's dominant position in the UK teen/youth market (and I even speak from personal experience here - it's the de-facto standard way of sharing photos, blog posts etc. for my daughter and most of her friends).

I'm very pleased to be working with the University of California Riverside's Sloan Center on their eLab City project in Second Life, see UCR's full press release.

GMI's involvement is along two lines:

- Direct integration of GMI's NetPanel2 panel management software with Second Life, enabling UCR to recruit and manage their academic panelists both in-world in Second Life, and through a conventional web-based interface. Objects inside Second Life are programmed using LSL to communicate with the panel management software through NetPanel2's XML-RPC web services.

- Creating and running survey avatar "bots" (automated Second Life users programmed and controlled by software) that are able to approach and engage respondents inside Second Life. These bots work along the same lines as the ones previously described here (for a video see the bottom of this previous post), so are able to conduct a survey using GMI's online survey software in-world, as well as being able approach potential respondents in a variety of different ways. This means the bot can also measure "meta-data" - e.g. reaction to the way it behaves or approaches people - in addition to the survey data itself.

For additional info, http://www.elabcity.com is updated regulary with updates of the development.

TechCrunch has a post called "The New Focus Group", mentioning two companies offering "white-label social networks to consumer research": Mzinga and Networked Insights. These offerings let "companies create a place on their sites where customers can hang out and talk about their products".

While this sounds interesting in some ways, I do wonder how many brands out there would have a chance in hell of carrying this off. Perhaps I'm the only one feeling a certain social networking ennui - but I certainly would much rather engage with brands in my existing social networking context (if I felt like engaging with brands at all), rather than joining yet another site somewhere.

Now that pretty much all the social networking sites are starting to open up to outside content (see Facebook apps and OpenSocial), I do wonder why not more people are looking at taking advantage of existing social networks, rather than providing the tools for creating custom ones. While this is technically not too difficult, I think it's not easy to create a "community" top-down, so I do have my reservations about these kinds of corporate-driven "let's create a social network around our brand" efforts. I just can't see average people flocking to these places just for the benefit of "talking about a brand's product". Embedding this kind of community inside my existing social network surely has a much better chance of succeeding?

Following on from my post about Google's OpenSocial announcement I've finally sat down to play with it, and implemented a bare-bones panel management app in the same vein as my Facebook prototype.

Again, this panel management and recruitment functionality could (and typically probably would) be part of some more specific, interest- or community-based application, which can then be embedded into pretty much any social networking site, including MySpace and Bebo once they fully start supporting it (full list of OpenSocial partners here).

For now, Ning and Orkut have implemented sandbox areas for OpenSocial, so I've taken some screenshots of both - remember this is the same OpenSocial/NetPanel2 application, just embedded in different social networking sites. The actual functionality is the same as the Facebook prototype, i.e. when a user adds the application to their profile, they get automatically added to the panel in GMI's NetPanel2, and as panel owner you can then communicate with your users through the embedded app, including sending survey invites, handling and redeeming incentives, etc. etc.

Here's two screenshots showing the application on Ning, the initial screen telling the user that there's a new survey, and the survey screen with the list of surveys and the link to take part.



... and here's the exact same two screens, but this time embedded in Orkut rather than Ning:



So... the combination of GMI's NetPanel2 and Google's OpenSocial allows for market research panel recruitment and management functionality to be embedded inside specific applications targetted at pretty much all the major social networking sites. Am I the only one that thinks this could be powerful stuff?

Google announced their OpenSocial API yesterday - making it a competitor to Facebook in the API/apps stakes. This API makes it possible to build applications for most of the major social networking sites (see here for a full list of launch partners, including MySpace) without having to re-write things for each site.

In turn, this means we should be able to integrate GMI panel management and recruitment features into all these sites, using just one application (with some CSS and UI tweaks for each of the sites) in the same way my facebook prototype works.

I had the pleasure of talking about GMI and Second Life survey technology at the NEON (Network Online Research) Plenum in Hamburg yesterday.

For all German speakers amongst my readers, my presentation (in German) is available for download here. Note that it's very large (24MB), as it contains a couple of Flash videos filmed in Second Life (if you do download the presentation, right-click and select "Play" to play the embedded Flash videos).

Generally it was a very interesting get-together, with discussions centered around Second Life/virtual worlds, web 2.0, and the ever-green "quality of online access panels".

If you want to quickly view the presentation and videos separately, they are embedded here:



Individual videos:

SLIC Interview Sofa:



GMI Interview Bot:

Having spent a little time looking through the conversations in some of the MR-related facebook groups (as an aside, I wish there was a more proactive way that groups would update you with what's being posted on their walls and discussions), I came across one that talked about a wish for some BarCamp-like meetups to share information on web 2.0 and social media for research and insight (as an alternative to the big, expensive, and generally top-down MR conferences).

I think that's a brilliant idea - for BarCamp read MRCamp!

It's vaguely in the same area as the Research Liberation Front, who ran a fringe meeting at the last MRS conference in Brighton, but would ideally be closer to the "everyone presents something" BarCamp ethos.

Is anyone up for this? If so, please contribute to the community wiki at mrcamp.org. If not, we'll consign it to the dustbin of history..

I recently had a thought about using Facebook for panel recruitment and engagement - a lot of what GMI's panel management software offers could actually be embedded into Facebook through using the GMI NetPanel2 web services in conjunction with the Facebook platform API. A couple of evenings later, and I have this:



Rather basic at the moment, but the beginnings of GMI NetPanel2/Facebook application integration...

*Update*: I improved on the layout a bit, so now different panel functions appear in the original Facebook style tabs. The more I play with this, the clearer it becomes that survey panel management can really be embedded deeply inside Facebook, both in terms of look and feel, and functionality.

What this means is that instead of creating panelist portal websites or similar recruitment efforts, we can develop a Facebook application for a given panel/community you want to build. When a facebook users adds the application to their profile, they're automatically being added to the panel through the NetPanel2 software, and from there you can allocate surveys to all or a subset of your Facebook users - and the links to complete these surveys will appear on the application canvas and optionally on their profile pages.

In short, I think this could be a useful way for a market research company or consumer brand to recruit and interact with Facebook users. Agree?

GMI has just announced a project I'm involved in, together with Diana Derval from Derval Research:

SLIC, the Second Life Interview Corner, featuring probably the world's first interviewing sofas! :-)

It's already been picked up by both Research magazine and MrWeb.