2012 thinking

…brings the usual predictions, thoughts, reviews & lists as to what’s next in every industry. There are a few that have caught our eye @watchmethink over the last few weeks due to their relevance to us and our 2012.

The wonderful review of the best blog posts of 2011 from Neil Perkin @Only Dead Fish features one from way back in Feb 2011 called ‘planning for participation’ which we loved, which outlined the 4 principles of participation, relevant for Watch Me Think, so relevant that we still follow those principles when thinking about or discussing our community.

• 1. What level of participation do we want or need?  (TASK)
• 2. Who do we want to participate? (TARGETING)
• 3. Why will they want to participate with this idea? (MOTIVATION)
• 4. Have we made it as easy as possible for them to participate? (USER EXPERIENCE)

Next up we read the research predictions from Next Gen Market Research professionals around the world. Two that caught our eye were Victoria Gamble from WorkINProgress who said that she expected ‘Increased demand for short, digestible and creative ways of presenting information to assist in getting insights ‘out there’’. And  Frankie Johnson, Founder of Research Arts who said ‘The word that keeps coming to my mind is “tangible”. People will increasingly value what they can touch and understand‘. Understandable, easily digestible insight (or simply observation) is exactly what we’re about. It was good to see both writers backing up that direction.

PSFK got 10 innovators to talk about trends for 2012. Graham Hill from treehugger.com said that whatever you do, make it ‘short & sexy’. It’s something that WMT believe in strongly – the videos WMT provide to our clients tend to be no longer than 2 minutes, unless requested. Most of all we want them to be memorable.

The last of the posts was ‘words to live by in 2012‘ featured on Research where they asked  research industry figures to sum up their hopes and expectations in a single word. These words include – Bravery, Accessibility, Respect, Discrimination, Regulation, Cooperation, System, Numberwang, Transparency & Fusion.

Edward Appleton from Avery Dennison talked about Fusion and about how research will ‘move away from a traditional silo organisational model and intensify its interaction across the functional boundaries within companies‘. If it does that, it has to be packaged up in such a way that the rest of the organisation will use and digest. We’re trying at WMT to make the research digestible, make it easy to understand and straightforward. Without that we know that it won’t be used, and then it becomes pointless.

So they were our favourites and nuggets we pulled out – what others out there have caught your eye?

2012. Here we go. We’ll see what happens.