Jeffrey Henning’s #MRX Top 10: Looking Backward, Looking Forward

By Jeffrey Henning & Tamara Barber

Many researchers writing for the press and the blogosphere these past few weeks drew their inspiration from Janus, the two-faced god who looks to the future and the past (and whose name is enshrined in January).  Here are the Top 10 most retweeted stories of the past two weeks by the #MRX community.

1. Words to live by in 2012 – Research magazine asked 10 industry luminaries for a single word that sums up “their hopes and expectations for the year ahead”.
2. 2012 Research Predictions (The NGMR Twiteratti) – Tom H.C. Anderson crowdsourced over 50 predictions for the coming year, with the first 20 listed here.
3. The eyes have it – Crawford Hollingworth tackles the observer effect and how even the expectation of being observed changes behavior in this Research article.
4. What’s the difference between Consumer Insights and Market Research? – Edward Appleton teases out some of the differences between describing our industry as “market(ing) research” vs. “consumer insights” in Europe and the U.S.
5. 2012 (1): New Years’ On A Rational Planet – Tom Ewing has some big thoughts on Big Data.
6. 2012 Market Research Crystal Ball – Dana Stanley addresses Tom Anderson’s call for predictions with five quite specific predictions in this post.
7. What Your Brand Needs To Know About The “Social Media Caucus” – Tom Webster looks at the difficulty of predicting the Iowa caucus results from social media chatter about the candidates and relates it to corporate insights from social media.
8. The 10 Most Interesting Social Media Studies of 2011 – Briana Kerensky for OhMyGov! sums up last year’s best social-media research initiatives.
9. The Year of Text Analytics – Tom Anderson follows up his roundups of other people’s predictions with his own, looking at text analytics in 2012.
10. Is Amazon on the verge of offering analytics? – James Verrinder of Research wonders if Amazon is about to provide data analytics services to businesses.

Alright, time to stop looking backward! Let’s see what else 2012 brings.