meaning: The Macer View/12

	The Macer View
	Comment and analysis from Tim Macer Number 12, August 2005

Resources

Software reviews

Software database

Reports & Thinkpieces

Conference papers

Press articles

The Macer View

Tim Macer offers an exclusive report from the thoroughly practical CASRO Technology Conference in New York

Interest in MR technology is just about back where it was prior to the 2001 dotcom crash, if attendance figures at this year’s CASRO Technology conference in New York offer any guide. But the topics presented for discussion drew more on the mood of the recent past, with an emphasis on the means to achieve cost reduction, greater efficiency and survival despite regulatory change and falling response, rather than the blue skies thinking and innovation of the pre-2001 days.

Offshore outsourcing, seen by many as the ultimate cost-cutting measure, was covered from two perspectives: the outsourced vendor route, experienced by James Fredrickson at Harris Interactive and the offshore office or ‘captive’ outsource route at MarketTools, described by Tom Patterson. Both had gone for India, though HI also has vendors in Costa Rica and Canada. Both stressed that the move must be a strategic one, to build capacity, not merely overcome cyclical overloads, Both also emphasised legwork needed in outsource-land, during inception and well beyond into the operational phase.

“You need to have the time at senior and middle management level to put it all in place” said Fredrickson, “and set reasonable expectations about the ROI. People tend to think 70% savings, but 30% is more realistic.”

The captive route does start to beg questions on how to manage the wage differentials into the longer term, as MarketTools had now moved staff from the USA to India, and is now starting to do the same in reverse. No answers were offered. But an economic relationship built on colonial principles can rarely achieve more than a temporary advantage, as history has repeatedly shown.

The worldwide online market is still growing and will more than double in the next 3 years to $3.8 billion, said Simon Chadwick, presenting findings from a worldwide survey he carried out for the online panel provider, GMI. He predicted an explosion in end-user panels, but sees demands for MR software diverging between MR firms seeking multimodal tools with integrated portals, and lighter-touch web-only tools for the DIY users, which he also predicted will grow dramatically.

Tracking, survey alerts and beacons will the web-survey buzzwords of smarter online research tools in the future according to Peter Milla, conference chair and CIO at Harris Interactive.

Tracking software will increase the reach of online surveys into hard behavioural measurement territory. Complementary to this, beacons offer a novel way to seed sites with invisible, tiny one pixel-sized images. As every page or image viewed by a user leaves a trace in a standard Web-server logfile, these beacons cunningly reveal a clear trail of activity as site users or respondents unwittingly trigger them in their meanderings through a real or simulated website.

Alerts will allow researchers to bypass the fraught mess that email has become. Constant vigilance is now needed to prevent even signed-up panel members’ survey invitations from being treated as spam by their ISP or corporate IT message filtering, or just ignored in the flood of messages received. The alert is a separate program activated remotely by the panel operator to alert respondents directly to surveys or even to incentives won - all without tangling with email. It’s a reminder that there are few obstacles which cannot be overcome by human ingenuity and the application of the right technology.