On The Move

Cross-posted from The Market Research Event Blog!  

Ok, folks, mobile’s here.  No more “mobile is coming, let’s start thinking about it.” 

I’m still seeing some news and blog tidbits out there that talk about mobile like it’s still a hazy vision on the horizon. Nope, it’s here and we need to focus on how we can embrace mobile for research.  

Similar to MROCs, mobile is becoming less of a “thing” to be discussed as a new and emerging technology and it’s becoming just another, albeit unique, platform by which we can gather data.  

Using mobile as a platform can be addressed in multiple ways, from making sure your surveys are mobile-ready to jumping in whole hog to things like mobile ethnography.  

Let’s start with the simple.

You've all been to conferences and most of us will see each other at #TMRE13. I've observed that most of us bring some sort of mobile device to the conference, most commonly a smart phone or tablet.  I work in the events (tradeshows and conferences) industry so I also have the chance to observe this at our own events, and we’re seeing more of this across the board. Paper notebooks are dwindling and electronic note-taking is surging. 

For our own events, some of the easy “quick-fix” changes we've made to address mobile platforms for research are: 

• Ensured our survey platform could render well on mobile

• Subtly shifted the way we designed surveys so they weren't a beast to answer on a mobile device (hello side-by-side matrices – I’m talking to you)

• Analyze on a regular basis on what platform(s) respondents are taking our event surveys 

Now, what we’re doing is pretty standard/table stakes, but we do have an eye to how else to use mobile, and the Dunkin Donuts case that David Forbes recently highlighted here on the TMRE blog is a great one, gathering “in the moment” feedback that in that situation was critical to the insight.

Companies like Revelation are a great example of fully embracing mobile, running mobile communities via their Revelation | Next platform to really dig into mobile ethnography projects.  

In the run up to #TMRE13, I also want to highlight how we can all learn more about mobile while we’re on site in Nashville.  We’re in luck, there’s an entire Mobile and Social Insights track for the Monday Day One Intensives! 

Hope to see you there.